The roving critic

FINDERS _by John V. A. Weaver_ POEMS _by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt_ INTO THE DARK _by Barbra Ring_ GOLDEN BIRD _by James Oppenheim_ LITERARY LIGHTS _by Gene Markey_ YOUR HIDDEN POWER...

The notion that unhappy men and women employ reading as an anodyne is not quite accurate. With them reading furnishes more than a substitute for thought; it furnishes them the o...

Into this desiccating atmosphere Mark Twain came just when its best spiritual oxygen had all been pumped out. Too insecure in his own standards not to defer to those of the esta...

Mark Twain and Henry James could have agreed on few subjects, but William Dean Howells was one of them. To such antipodean geniuses he stood as equally great writer and great fr...

The Puritans in New England, indeed, knew or cared little enough about Shakespeare. The late Thomas Goddard Wright’s scrupulous researches have unearthed no signs that Shakespea...

I admit that Paul Bunyan still lacks his Marlowe and his Goethe, but I contend that he is a fellow at least as well worth keeping an eye on as Bevis of Southampton or Guy of War...

Now such unaccustomed qualities as dilettantism and languor in the midst of a nation which had plunged into furious industrial competition and was beginning to cherish imperiali...

When we read or think about the past, what images actually form in our minds? Take the average American, for instance. He probably has two sets of such images and no more. One i...

And yet it is less than fair to make this distinction between men and their lagging cousins of the tree-tops. Not monkeys too abruptly promoted to be men but men come too abrupt...

The French will be French! Even in the dungeon, say the old gallants, they longed for the most murderous gleam of beauty. Better that and annihilation than the long night of saf...

The hunger of sex is amazingly set forth by D. H. Lawrence, whose novel _The Rainbow_ was suppressed in England and who has now brought out his _Women in Love_ in the United Sta...

The single solid volume of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s _Collected Poems_ holds without crowding all but a few lines of the verse into which one of the acutest of Americans has di...

At each new turning season I ask myself what annual phrase in the great epic of the year most pricks the senses: the stir of sap in the maples, the earliest robin coldly foragin...