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Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing

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Epstein is one of the finest literary critics in America today. He has a very tough kind of intelligence, and a real ability to make works of Literature relate to the world that we live in.

I love this collection of essays about literature. Some of the sentences in the pieces are as witty and amusing as those found in the author's short stories. Epstein's criticism has teeth. He doesn't give fiction writers and other critics easy praise. The following comments are offered to give the prospective reader a sense of what the volume contains.

To begin, Epstein asserts that he has learned nothing reading about three hundred reviews of his books. He notes that John O'Hara was thin-skinned. A reviewer should not show too much generosity. Many great essays started as book reviews. As a young man, through book reviewing, Epstein got his education in public. To a neophyte future biographer, (namely one Joseph Epstein), the life of John Dos Passos seemed to offer everything. The author passed up the opportunity thinking the result would have been bulky but not weighty.

Edmund Wilson mined the connection between literature and biography. Literary criticism has been professionalized in the universities. Currently the literary intellectual is disappearing and politics intrudes. The preponderance of American writers now work in universities. There is an overproduction of criticism of contemporary writers.

One section of the collection is titled, `Portraits of Novelists'. Robert Stone is a novelist of the highest ambition. At age fifty John Updike was still at the stage of being promising. All the heroes in Updike sound Updikean. Philip Roth has everything but a generous spirit. Cynthia Ozick is a brilliant and quirky essayist and novelist. She has a sense of artistic vocation. She is an original.

Van Wyck Brooks, (this is another section) has literary style. Brooks was successful as a young critic. His later work has been considered a failure. He attacked the founding fathers of modern literature. Edmund Wilson was an uncompromising professional. He was lucky in his teachers, Alfred Rolfe and Christian Gauss. He became the last living link to the 1920's. Epstein deems PATRIOTIC GORE Wilson's best book.

Max Perkins became an editorial force when THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, a book and author he championed, became a best-seller. Fitzgerald brought Ring Lardner and Hemingway to Scribners. In the end John Dos Passos was neglected. There were no honors. James Gould Cozzens is a faded literary figure. An essay by Dwight Mcdonald damaged his reputation.