Alfred Kazin is a literary critic with craft and style, an artist at his chosen trade. Even the slighter pieces he brings off—occasional reviews for The New Republic or The New York Review of Books—are often blessed with a prose which can mix something of the energy in the work considered with that in the critic’s consideration of it. And two of the essays in Kazin’s Contemporaries—the ones on Moby Dick and Light in August, which are masterpieces of inquiring, yet impassioned approval—are among the best pieces of American criticism.

Is Kazin, then, a great critic? This is quite another matter. I’m told that some years ago, when Kazin was visiting Edmund Wilson, the latter, feeling suddenly ill (he had been thinking of death, as men his age often do), said to Kazin before going up to bed, “If I don’t come down in the morning for breakfast—something untoward may happen—promise me that you’ll take up my torch.” The next morning Wilson, feeling better, came down to breakfast with Kazin, and, when asking the latter to pass him the butter, added, “and with it, please hand me back my torch.”

Now Wilson wasa great critic. If not for the depth or originality of his ideas, then for the devotion and care with which he examined literary works not only of this country and our time, but of so many other countries, so many other times, and always in the particular language of the