Inviting as this subject customarily is, it is peculiarly
attractive as it bears on Brooks's achievement and reputation.
For this extraordinarily gifted man sought to induce literary
criticism to serve aims which are ordinarily reserved for
fiction, hoped to assign personal memoir the role customarily
performed by legend. My task has been therefore to
retrace the designs of motive which led this half-historical,
half-legendary figure to embrace certain portentous ideas, to
initiate certain alliances, to exult in and to discredit partic-
ular modes of conducting the life of the mind in our time.
Brooks's distinguishing feature was an ardor for thought.
Salvation was his unalterable need. And his life was spent in
an effort to reconcile his will and his want within the limits
imposed by two literary disciplines, criticism and history,
which are not remarkably well-adapted to fulfill these ends.
A strange combination of daring and perversity of mind led
him to think that he could compel these twin disciplines
to serve as instruments of his will rather than as means for
the study of the forms and patterns of the American imagina-
tion.

Now, nearly a decade after his death, a half century after
he issued his first rallying call for reform of the intellec-
tual life in America, he presents himself as one of the most
engrossing figures of our recent past. Confronting Brooks,
we contemplate the operation of a seismic intelligence whose
energy once seemed to incarnate the temper of an entire liter-
ary generation, the twenties generation. Its chief survivors
today are of course Glenway Wescott and Matthew Joseph-
son, Granville Hicks, Malcolm Cowley and Kenneth Burke,
Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson. Retracing Brooks's
encounter with the social, political, moral and literary prob-
lems with which he and his colleagues were beset, we discover
some traces of motive, not hidden merely unrecognized,
within a group of distinguished persons -- the very group,
indeed, which cherished Brooks as its most unquenchably
determined leader.

Despite vast differences of temperament and accomplish-
ment, members of this group hang together -- even today --
by virtue of their disdain for the role of specialist of letters

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