The Modern Temper admirably summed up the philosophy of defeatism of the muddled and sadly disillusioned post-war generation. Obviously, the intellectual atmosphere which Mr. Krutch described was the one held in part or as a whole by many of his contemporaries. He gives coherent and reasoned utterance to what many of them felt in a more or less nebulous, uncertain manner. The book, nevertheless, is primarily an effort at self-understanding. It is a personal confession as well as a study of "the moder...

In his attempt to apply psychoanalysis to the career of Edgar Allan Poe for purposes of literary criticism [Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius], Joseph Wood Krutch exhibited a commendable degree of competence for a layman. He seems to have had at his command a fairly good, though incomplete, outline of psychoanalysis as it was constituted circa 1926 and a serviceable understanding of the nature of unconscious conflict as well as certain of its overt manifestations. The psychoanalytic concepts which he uses ...

In Krutch's autobiography [More Lives Than One], there is a strong sense of crisis, insight and redirection at two points in his career; the result in both instances was a book that seemed to write itself, rapidly, out of a fullness of conviction and intensity of feeling. The first was The Modern Temper; and to the extent that it entailed a deliberate embracing of human values sanctioned by art, history and tradition, it may better be termed a reversion than a conversion. Apparently it saved him from...

Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, in a new biography called Samuel Johnson, has at last provided a study that is designed to restore to Johnson his real literary interest and importance. With all the work that has been done on Johnson and his friends, there has, as he says, been no such biography…. [Krutch] has devoted quite enough attention and given a quite favorable enough account of Boswell, and his nervously apprehensive glances in the direction of the Boswell fans are simply a part of that continued trib...

Looking back on [Krutch's] career, one must acknowledge certain shortcomings. Perhaps, by the most austere standards of literary history, Krutch falls short of deserving a place in the very first rank of American writers. After abjuring the effort to become "distinctly high-brow"—an effort which brought him his earliest fame but hardly his greatest happiness—his literary ambition, like his thought, became more modest and also more genuine. His search as a man for values pr...

Joseph Wood Krutch has accurately sub-titled ["Modernism" in Modern Drama] "A Definition and Estimate." According to him, modernism consists of a rejection of three beliefs fundamental in the previously-held credo of post-Renaissance man—that man is "a creature capable of dignity," that life "as led in this world" is worth living and that "the realm of human rationality is the realm in which many may most fruitfully live." Krutch t...

If Joseph Wood Krutch had been writing about our drama in 1909 instead of 1939, one suspects that what is now his most valuable asset as a critic would have been lacking, or would not have been an asset. He has no ax to grind; he is the champion of no style or -ism. [In "The American Drama Since 1918" he] asks what the dramatist has tried to do, and then considers how far he has succeeded and what importance the aim may have. At a period when the drama is plainly entering on an era of eclectic...

The men who come to life not with standards, but with a vast and varied genius of understanding are, of course, all the while having their say. And work of this sort is done with distinction and skill by Joseph Wood Krutch in his volume of biographical criticism, Five Masters. He writes of Boccaccio, Cervantes, Richardson, Stendhal, and Proust. The fleshy aspects of the experience and writing of Boccaccio he describes and interprets with skill and understanding. But he moves rather like a blind man in the d...