In the course of reviewing the memoirs of N.N. Sukhanov – the man who famously called Stalin a ‘gray blur’ – Dwight Macdonald gave a serviceable description of the two types of radical witnesses to the Russian Revolution: ‘Trotsky’s is …
In 1959, Alfred Kazin wrote ‘The Alone Generation,’ an incisive and brilliant essay about the failures of modern literature. The critic who would later describe himself as a ‘cultural conservative’ and, semi-seriously, a ‘literary reactionary’ uttered this cri de coeur: …
Edmund Wilson has been an object of saintly veneration and nostalgia to those old enough to remember when literary critics were arbiters of how people spent their time between meals and work. Who now, in the age of the hatchet …