New England Shrub Oak

Henry David Thoreau by Joseph Wood Krutch. American Men of Letters Series. William Sloane Associates. $3.50

The last full-length study of Thoreau, Mr. Henry Seidel Canby’s, appeared in 1939. Now Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch has written another, the first volume of a new series which is planned, according to the publishers “as an integrated group of authoritative volumes written by today’s best critics.” Mr. Krutch’s book is shorter and dryer than Mr. Canby’s sometimes sugary Thoreau. He relies upon his predecessor for some of the purely biographical details, but he quite properly plays down Thoreau’s abortive romances which Mr. Canby warmed up, one can’t help thinking, in order to domesticate and to normalize his sexless Concord bachelor. But if Mr. Krutch is not so rapturously speculative about Thoreau’s affairs of the heart, he does not depart very drastically from the conception of Thoreau as a sort of misunderstood prickly-pear who enjoyed domesticity and a limited companionship and whose churlishness was not so much a product of any latent misanthropy as it was of a social uneasiness intensified by a depressingly respectable Concord.