SOURCE: "A True Inheritor," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 233, No. 2, February, 1974, pp. 90-2.

Louchheim was an American poet, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following positive review of What the Woman Lived, she comments on Bogan's life and works.

In a letter dated 1939, Louise Bogan expands an argument about Boswell and Johnson into a few epithets on life: "Aloneness is peculiar-making, to some extent, but not any more so … than lots of Togetherness I've seen."

Miss Bogan's aloneness was never peculiar, and always deliberate. A good deal of her seclusion was spent in carrying out one of her own dicta: "The least we can do, is to give a phrase to the post."

In the more than four hundred letters collected and edited by Ruth Limmer in What the Woman Lived, Miss Bogan managed to give us a stylish, clear, and entertaining literary history of the fifty years...