Literary critic, Arthur Mizener (1907-1988) was Mellon Foundation Professor of English at Cornell University from 1951 to 1975. In addition to other works, he authored the first biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise (1951) along with a biography of Ford Madox Ford, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (1971).
Literature and the Professors: A Symposium
Autumn 1940
Scholars as Critics
The basic function of the literary scholar was clearly indicated by Dr. Johnson when he remarked that “all works which describe manners require notes in sixty or seventy years” if […]
Nonfiction
Autumn/ November 1966
The Undistorting Mirror
James Gould Cozzens is half a generation younger than Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, and his background differs from theirs in a way that would not have concerned Dos Passos […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1961
Angles on Saxons: An American View and a British View
I An American View: Arthur Mizener II A British View: Malcolm Bradbury A Mirror For Anglo-Saxons by Martin Green. Harper and Brothers, $3.50. I It is not news that […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1960
A Dance to the Music of Time: The Novels of Anthony Powell
… as if they had all heard that enchanted horn of Astolpho, that English Duke in Ariosto, which never sounded but all his auditors were mad, & for fear ready […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1957
Spring Fiction
The Town. By William Faulkner. Random House. $3.95. Tunes of Glory. By James Kennaway. Harper. $3.00. The Sea And The Wedding. By Pamela Hansford Johnson. Harcourt, Brace. $3.95. The Sandcastle. […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1955
The Thin, Intelligent Face of American Fiction¹
The phrasing of my title is, I realize, ambiguous. The phrase itself comes from Faulkner’s “Go Down, Moses,”—”a thin, intelligent, unstable face, a rumpled linen suit from whose lapel a […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1954
Transformations
The Fables Of La Fontaine translated by Marianne Moore. The Viking Press. $5.00.A Summoning Of Stones by Anthony Hecht. Macmillan. $2.50. A translation of La Fontaine’s Fables by Miss […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1954
Good Night Sweet Ladies
The Flowers Of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein edited by Donald Gallup. Knopf. $5.00. Katherine Mansfield: A Biography by Antony Alpers. Knopf. $5.00. Though Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield […]
Fiction
Autumn 1953
Undiscovered Country
Johnny could not remember when he had not known about Bonny Strange. Back in the already fabulous past, where things that had actually happened were mixed up in his memory […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1953
The Great Profession
Language As Gesture by R. P. Blackmur. Harcourt, Brace. $5.75. There is no critic writing today who knows as well as Mr. Blackmur how to distinguish the modes of language […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1953
Brilliant and Exasperating
Ushant: An Essay by Conrad Aiken. Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Little, Brown and Company. $4.50 This is a book by a gifted man whose literary career has been much more […]
My Credo: A Symposium of Critics (Continued)
Spring 1951
IX. Not in Cold Blood
I am sure it is a very good thing for the editors of The Kenyon Review to set up this little group portrait of contemporary criticism (like those engravings of […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1951
A Large Fiction
Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. Knopf. $5.00. The heroic subject for the 20th Century has been the enormous, invisible geologic slip in western culture which has destroyed its foundations. […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1950
Amphibium in Old Kentucky
World Enough and Time by Robert Penn Warren. Random House. $3.50 Mr. Warren’s new novel has not had a very good press. One reviewer, noting its subtitle (“A Romantic Novel”) […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1950
The Novel of Manners in America
Mr. Blackmur has recently suggested in the pages of The Kenyon Review (Winter, 1949) that we are probably in for a little “new criticism” of the novel; he does not […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1949
Truth Maybe, Not Fiction
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Harcourt, Brace. $3.00 This is not a great novel, but it is an important book, because it is by Mr. Orwell and because it attacks […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1948
A Note on “The World’s Fair”
Fitzgerald’s story, “The World’s Fair,” belongs to the period following the completion of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald sent Maxwell Perkins the manuscript of The Great Gatsby late in the fall […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1948
The Scrutiny Group
The group of critics who were gathered around Mr. Leavis and Scrutiny in the early ‘thirties have, in addition to sixteen years of publication in Scrutiny itself, produced a considerable […]
Fiction
Autumn 1946
You Never Go Back to Sleep
The writers of the nineteen-twenties seem to feel like immigrants in the world you and I grew up in, as if they were puzzled by the overtones of the conversation […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1945
Mr. Auden’s Tennyson
A Selection From The Poems Of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Selected and with an introduction by W. H. Auden. Doubleday, Doran. $3.00 The spectacle of Mr. Auden, the bad boy […]
The Hopkins Centennial (Concluded)
Autumn 1944
Victorian Hopkins
The emphasis on the oddness and modernness of Hopkins’ poetry has diminished considerably of late. This shift began, perhaps, with Mr. Abbott’s Introductions to the Letters; it is marked in […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1944
Verse and Poetry
The Best Poems of 1942 selected by Thomas Moult. Harcourt, Brace. $2.00. New Poems of 1943 edited by Oscar Williams. Howell, Soskin. $2.75. mr u will not be missed who […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1943
Poetry from Right to Left
It is a strange experience to read through such a random selection of verse as this one. Time alone, “brutal,” as Mr. Jarrell would say, “as a thumb,” made it, […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1942
The Elizabethan Art of Our Movies
The excuse for this paper is not any expert knowledge of the movies but a feeling that the movies are a testing case for our criticism; or perhaps I should say, […]
The Kenyon Review Credos
Not in Cold Blood
From The Kenyon Review, Spring 1951, Vol. XIII, No. 2 I am sure it is a very good thing for the editors of The Kenyon Review to set up this […]