“Then shall I dare these real ills to hide In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?” —George Crabbe English must be kept up. It rarely is. But what a splendid collection of offenses against it is in D.J. Enright’s book of euphemism. Those who delight in the instructions for Japanese small appliances will here encounter the...
Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic by David Bromwich; Oxford University Press, New York. T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style by Ronald Bush; Oxford University Press, New York. I stumbled on Hazlitt while I was still in college and have some old books of his that cost me 50 cents each-one that I...
Gilbert A. Harrison: The Enthusiast: A life of Thornton Wilder; Ticknor & Fields; New Haven CT. by Ronald Berman Thornton Wilder was a hugely successful writer and evidently a very good man. As to the first, in 1927 The Bridge of San Luis Rey earned $20,000 in royalties, a figure which can be compared with...
Matthew Bruccoli is, perhaps, the leading biographer of modern American novelists. With this book he scores something of a triple, as it appeared soon after his acclaimed lives of Fitzgerald and O’Hara. Like his other works, it is exceptionally well-produced. It is a handsome book, with a full apparatus of notes and documents. There is...