The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

A BOOKMAN from the word go. Van Wyck Brooks is widely respected for his evaluation of American literature. His contemporary experience gained as a young assistant to Mr. Page, as an instructor in English at Stanford, as a publisher in the offices of the Century Company, and as an associate editor of the Freeman, has been balanced by the most extensive reading. In 1920, Mr. Brooks projected a trilogy of biographies aimed to canvass ‘ the whole problem of the literary life in the United States.’ In The Ordeal of Mark Twain be traced a career of partial failure, the career of a writer of potential greatness who belittled himself by his ’adaptation to environment.’ In The Pilgrimage of Henry James he exemplified that other kind of partial failure which results when one attempts an escape from a natural environment. Now, in The Life of Emerson, Mr. Brooks has portrayed an American who neither compromised with American civilization nor ran away from it.