"American Characteristics," the collection of Wilder essays (a few of them reconstructed from notes or newly published), contains no startling personal revelations, but it does suggest the extent and diversity of an intellectual or mental terrain still not fully explored by his biographers…. These observations about writers and art and books—"bookishness" in its best sense he defined as "loving great books as though they were people"—disclose the breadth and catholicity of his reading, his lucidity and acuteness. More to the point, they define his conception of himself: the friendly guide and admonisher of his own special America, the preacher-entertainer attuned to the Goethean World Spirit receptive to all human experience. The Wilder of the essays is steeped in his country, its history and geography, and he continually seeks ways of compensating for its deficiencies, less by submerging himself in its culture or escaping from it than...