Waldo Frank occupies a peculiar place in the history of American letters. Though a novelist, and one of the most prominent and highly regarded critics of the interwar years of the twentieth century, Frank was almost uniformly dismissed or forgotten by the time of his death in 1967. Today he strikes most literary and intellectual historians as an elusive and certainly secondary figure significant only for his association with writers he had befriended and whose work, in many cases, he had been the first to champion: Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Jean Toomer, and others. Yet at the peak of Frank's career, his reputation as a writer and commentator on American culture and politics was enormous. His success as associate editor of the Seven Arts (1916-1917) and author of Our America (1919) suggested that Frank might be the logical successor to Randolph Bourne as a critic who united political and cultural...