Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971)

The premise of Angle of Repose is that Susan Burling’s marriage to Oliver Ward was no picnic. It’s a sad narrative without the pleasures and high spirits of a picnic. According to her grandson Lyman Ward, who writes her life story, Susan Burling’s marriage to Oliver...

Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground[s] (1972)

Camp meetings are an American tradition, the first of which seems to have been organized by James McGready (c.1760–1817) based on the Scottish Presbyterian outdoor revival meetings. These meetings were introduced to England in 1807, especially by the Methodists. The...

Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Stugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972)

The Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is somewhere in Canada, where specialists pick through the debris left by careless Extraterrestrial picnickers. There is no picnic.The picnic is a metaphor offered by knowledgeable scientist Valentine Pillman to explain the...

Laurent de Brunhoff’s Babar Visits Another Planet (1972)

Brunhoff ‘s Babar Visits Another Planet (1972) begins at the start of ­­yet another family picnic until a rocketship upsets the fun. Before they realize the situation, Babar, Celeste, their children Pom, Flora, Arthur, cousin Alexander, and Zephir, the monkey, are...

J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Khrishnapur (1973)

Farrell’s picnic in The Siege of Khrishnapur siege is purposely mischaracterized as entertainment for local Indians watching Sepoys attack the official Residency of the East India Company’s residence. It’s a fictional addition to a historical siege lasting five months...

Alexander Moffat’s The Picnics (1963)

Moffat’s picnics, all titled Picnic and all completed in 1963, are influenced by Fernand Leger’s Partie de champagne series o paintings.  Featured Image: The Picnic at the New Bridge

Walker Evans’s Robert Lowell and Caroline Blackwood Picnicking in Kent (1973)

Evans’s photograph of Robert Lowell and Caroline Blackwood suggests they are just another loving couple picnicking on the grass. Evans was aware of the couple’s tension but wrote to a friend, “I think they do a lot for each other, and it is a great...

Tom Stoppard’s “Wickerwork Picnic Baskets” (1972)

Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) includes the memorable simile: “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” A neat turn of phrase....

William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (1973)

Goldman’s The Princess Bride takes a satiric jab at a traditional lovers’s picnic. “Indeed,” he writes in the novel, Vizzini, “had set out a little picnic spread. From the knapsack that he always carried, he had taken a small handkerchief, and on it, he has...

Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973)

Lester’s The Three Musketeers  is a comic adaptation of Alexandre Duma’s novel. The halte de chasse on the royal hunt portrays the lavish preparation for an outdoor meal fit for a king.   Louis XIV spent many hours hunting, and there is a passing...