Literary Opinion in America Volume II Author:Morton Dauwen Zabel The one indispensable anthology of contemporary American criticism " - Allen Tate No one was better equipped... to make a representative canvass of contemporary critics, for the task required the patient thoroughness to sift the mass of periodicals and the tact to discriminate. By reprinting these essays [ Mr. Zabel] has furnished a guidebook of... more » the best sort, and has increased it's value by his long introduction, which is a compressed history of American criticism during the last half century, a history which he illuminates by treating it as 'the record of a nations education'.Among his most useful services are his rejuvenation of Henry Jame's claims as a critic,his unexpected but accurate linking together of the aims of Howells and Brownell, his hitting upon just the epithets to describe Huneker's work as 'esthetic publicity' and to indicate that what Brooks produced was not criticism' in any pure or technical sense,' but rather 'Americanization'...The design of Zabel's final section is to show the points at which we have now arrived through the controversy over sociological and esthetic relations." FO Matthiessen« less