Alfred Kazin

When William Faulkner published a first novel in 1926 entitled "Soldiers' Pay," no one could possibly have known that the ghost of the Gothic novel had appeared to record a new and portentously macabre view of contemporary dissolution. Cheerfully sla [...]

The Uxpense of Greatness. By Richard P. Blackmur. Arrow Editions. $3.00. On literature Today. By Van Wyck Brooks. E. P. Dutton and Company. $1.00. Reason in Madness. By Allen Tate. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.50. Do Thest Bones Live? By Edward Dahlberg. [...]

The society into which Edith Wharton was born was still, in the 1860's, the predominant American aristocracy. Established in New York behind its plaster-cast of Washington, its Gibbon and its Hoppner, its Stuart and its Washington Irving, it was a sn [...]