Volume 18, Number 5 · March 23, 1972
The Scholar as Activist
By Lewis Mumford
J.E. Spingarn
by Marshall Van Deusen
Twayne Publishers, 198 pp., $4.95
No one could write an adequate account of American letters during the first thirty years of this century without discussing the work and influence of Joel Elias Spingarn. Yet it is only now, a whole generation after his death in 1939, that the first preliminary estimate of his achievements has appeared. We owe a debt to Professor Van Deusen for having undertaken this delicate and exacting task. His brief sketch, interweaving biography with criticism, has a clarity often lost in a more exhaustive study. And one may praise this book further by saying that even when it exposes the weaknesses in Spingarn's early manifestoes, with their sweeping rejection of the traditional canons of criticism, it would have earned the approbation of Spingarn himself, who was too good a critic to overlook his own shortcomings.
Review, 3996 words
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