American Humanist

"American Humanist," Commentary, November 1950. (A review of Classics and Commercials and The Little Blue Light by Edmund Wilson.)

Excerpt:

“He has a genuine classical taste, he is not often influenced by fads, and he reads, and writes about what he reads, because he honestly enjoys doing so. Literature is for him not a pretext for an impressive article but a strong taste which he cannot help indulging and which he likes to talk about.” These are words that Edmund Wilson applies to Cyril Connolly in one of the essays in Classics and Commercials. I do not know just how accurately this description fits Connolly, but it does state very well the qualities of learning, unpretentiousness, and love of letters that have made Edmund Wilson America’s foremost literary critic.

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