“The first thing that we ask of a writer,” George Orwell once wrote, “is that he shall not tell lies, that he shall say what he really thinks, what he really feels.” Part of the reason Orwell so esteemed truthfulness was that he cared passionately about the historical record handed on to future generations. Kenneth S. Lynn, who in The Air-Line to Seattle certainly shows no hesitation about saying what he really believes, shares Orwell’s concern for the historical record. The essays and reviews in this collection, half of which first appeared in Commentary magazine, make noteworthy amendments to that record, and their cumulative effect is to force a reader to reassess much of what has been written about American literature and history.

Lynn intends to jar intellectuals from complacency and expose the extent to which ideological bias and slovenly scholarship have replaced genuine criticism. He begins more or less where Oscar Handlin left off in Truth in History(1979). There Handlin wrote: “The flaccid acceptance of shoddy work had long been a scandal of scholarly and literary journals, which encouraged reviewers to focus on interpretations rather than on craftsmanship. To expose an error of fact was regarded as irrelevant nit-picking, a reflection upon the critic who grubbed about in footnotes rather than soaring with the ideas.” Handlin regretted that “the correctness or incorrectness of statements and the proper or improper use of evidence were trivial issues.” When correctness no longer mattered, all interpretations became equal. Only points