When we think of the contempt for American authors,
mixed with ignorance about them, that prevailed in the
universities, during the reign of Barrett Wendell . . . we
might also remember that Brooks had more to do with
creating the new attitude than anyone else in the country.
Not a few of the academic critics who attacked him in later
years were men whose careers would have been impossible if
Brooks had not found them a subject and broken a path
they could follow. -- Malcolm Cowley, 1963

"Who does not know the now routine legend in which the
world of 1910-1917 is Washington Square turned Arcadia,
in which the barriers are always down, the magazines always
promising, the workers always marching, geniuses sprouting
in every Village bedroom, Isadora Duncan always dancing --
that world of which John Reed was the Byronic hero, Mabel
Dodge the hostess, Randolph Bourne the martyr, Van Wyck
Brooks the oracle?" Amazing -- that Alfred Kazin, in 1942,
exactly twenty-five years after the time which this synoptic
passage was intended to evoke, could assume as a matter of
course not only that the legend of national resurgence would
last indefinitely but also that the reputations of key persons
were unimpeachable. Today, after another twenty-five years,
that world appears more routine than miraculous. The
memory of Isadora fades. Bourne, the grief of his early
death mainly forgotten, regains only a modest attention.
Reed, chiefly by way of the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet
Revolution, retains his brio indeed, but what of Mabel

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