KS Culbreth

These pages contain the writing of KS Culbreth, writer, literary critic, and essayist.

From now on, I’m in it for me.

Unfortunately, that seems to be one of the guiding principles of this our age. I won’t give in to that impulse, will not be lured by the Siren of self-absorption. But as we must not allow those who have embraced this as their mantra to trample us in their march toward glory, their quest to amass whatever is their desire, neither must we forsake the opportunities that come our way to display our labors of love. My intent in creating this web site is to display some of my writing.

I have done an inordinate amount of reading as part of my ongoing studies over the years. I tend to read eclectic authors and topics, thinkers who were popular once but who are largely obscure and forgotten now. Part of my intent in bringing this web site together is to reintroduce some of those writers and to shine some light on what they thought and wrote that was of importance during their day…and ought to be of importance to ours.

What is the impetus that drives me through the weary and isolated states, through the reiterative process from which good writing is born? My aim is to create a body of literature that will captivate and enlighten and will thereby endure. That aim may best be encapsulated in this reference Malcolm Cowley made to Faulkner:

The author should sacrifice himself to the work, producing it ‘in the agony and sweat of the human spirit,’ as Faulkner said, ‘not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.’
–Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley Files