The Catacombs Author:William Denby Copywright 1960 - from the introduction - — "William Denby is an American Black in his middle forties, who has been living in Rome for the better part of twenty years...His writing is not so much American as cosmopolitan and European. Above all it is modernist: nonrepresentational is the metaphor that comes to mind. — ...He is the direct descenda... more »nt of that pioneering generation whom we associate with the origins of modern art...In his fiction he abandons the conventional plot-line based on linear time and replaces it with a matrix or mosaic, essentially timeless, which Gertrude Stein has called " the continuous present."...The result is a series of illuminating insights, a brilliant chrstallization of contemporary consciousness."« less