It would be safe to say that Wilder never intended [the essays in American Characteristics and Other Essays] to be collected—there is much repetition of ideas, ever of passages, from one essay to the next. Several of the never-before-published essays might best have been left that way (these reveal Wilder's confessed difficulty in "putting down one declarative sentence after another" in stilted or scatter-shot organization). And, to get the carping over with, Wilder's "big" ideas are few, and derived mainly from his reading of Gertrude Stein and the classics. But what the essays do offer—and this should not be dismissed—is a personal view of literature from a writer whose intuitive understanding of human nature supports all his great works, whether dramatic, fictive, or critical.

First, the ideas. The three essays on "American Characteristics," taken from Wilder's 1950 Norton lectures on Melville, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson, set...