THE WOUND AND THE BOW

Edmund Wilson is one of the few consistently competent critics of this time — to many the outstanding. His is a faculty for the interpretative in conjunction with the precise, his studies are at all times vigorous, animated, perceptive. He is by personal bias. There are seven studies in literature here — on very diversified subjects. Two are long, surveying and passing judgment on the voluminous works of Dick and Kipling Dickens whom he considers the greatest dramatic writer since Shakespeare, Kipling, who failed to dramatize any fundamental conflict and therefore never got beyond the short story successfully. Shorter appraisals follow — of ssnava, Edith Wharton, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Sophocles' Philo Important for school and college libraries, for public libraries, for study groups.