It's like a Who's Who of American literary modernism. A lot of the things that most puzzled me about the book started to make sense, given who he was talking to. Ms. George discovered that whole pages of Permanence and Change had first been sketched in Burke's reviews of now-forgotten authors. The book's weird energy and somewhat puzzling structure were a byproduct of extensive dialogues with other thinkers. His theories of communication make more sense if you understand whom he was communicating with at the time.
Scholars quote that a lot.
I guess it's in keeping with the image we have of him as a loner. But when you get into the archive, what you find is that he was actually plugged into the most remarkable set of intellectual networks. He's interested in psychoanalysis, but he's also talking with the neo-Aristotelians who were at the University of Chicago. If anything, I think that Burke actually joined as many clubs as he could. We think of him as this hermit thinking complex thoughts in the wilderness, but that's not the whole story.