SOURCE: Lerner, Max. “The Liberalism of O. G. Villard.” New Republic 98, no. 1273 (26 April 1939): 342-44.

In the following review, Lerner finds that The Fighting Years provides more insight into Villard's milieu than his personality.

Mr. Villard's book of memoirs [The Fighting Years], compact of militancy, indignation and an underlying sense of failure, lights up a whole period in the history of American liberalism. It does not to the same degree delineate a personality. There is little in it of the interior writing that has marked the creative tradition in modern autobiography, from Rousseau to Henry Adams and Lincoln Steffens. The category it falls into is “this I remember and this I did,” rather than “this is how I shaped my view of life.” Despite the warm chapters on the author's childhood years, on his Harvard days, on his early experiences as a reporter in Philadelphia, there is a poverty...