Cowley has made several valuable contributions to contemporary letters with his editions of Important American authors (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F Scott Fitzgerald), his writings as a literary critic for The New Republic, and, above all, for his chronicles and criticism of modern American literature. Cowley's literary criticism does not attempt a systematic philosophical view of life and art, nor is it representative of a neatly defined school of critical thought, but rather focuses on works-particularly those of "lost generation" writers-that he feels his personal experience has qualified him to explicate and that he considers worthy of public appreciation. The critical approach Cowley follows is undogmatic and is characterized by a willingness to view a work from whatever perspective---social, historical, aesthetic-that the work itself seems to demand for its illumination.

Gone with the Wind is an encyclopedia of the plantation legend. Other novelists...