The career of Joseph Wood Krutch is remarkable for its variety of achievement. In his early years he became highly visible as a New York drama critic writing for the Nation. In the last decades of his life he gained a new reputation as a naturalist. In the course of his career he wrote critical biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Johnson, and Henry David Thoreau which remain secure in their respective critical canons. His greatest achievement, however, was his social criticism, in particular The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (1929), an attempt to assess the darker undercurrents of the 1920s. Bertrand Russell found The Modern Temper "profoundly interesting and penetrating," while Granville Hicks called it "one of the crucial documents of this generation." For his later reassessment of The Modern Temper, entitled The Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival, and the Modern Temper (1954), Krutch...