Edmund Wilson is that rare sort of American writer, a master of prose style. (p. 99)

Poe, De Quincy, Shaw, Balzac, France, Dickens, Joyce, and to some extent Huneker and Mencken, have been his chief models. They are all vigorous creative writers with acutely independent styles. Thus Wilson has learned not only that forthrightness is the best critical policy, but also that a personal code, a sensitive social conscience, and a willingness to go out on a limb are all aspects of intellectual courage without which a critic falls into academicism or Sunday-review philistinism. He has also admired the French for their lucidity, the sociological bent of their critics, and the dual enterprise of their invention which undertakes, whenever possible, to deal equally with the man and the work. And all his books reveal that his sympathies are sooner engaged by a literature of ideas, the naturalistic novel, the...