Fruits of the MLA

To the Editors:

Surely Edmund Wilson intended to write “Albert Paine Bigelow’s old biography” not “Albert Payson Terhune’s.” I suppose that this reference to Terhune (the collie’s Balzac) will be permanently enshrined in the “Wilson canon” by some future MLA editor either as a precious piece of discarded chaff or, perhaps more significantly, as a vital clue to his creative processes. As Messrs. Wilson and Mumford have demonstrated, the MLA editorial process is a slaughter-house in which nothing goes to waste.

Frank J. Donner

New York City