The Bookman: William Troy on Literature and Criticism, 1927-1950

William Troy (1903-1961) was a highly regarded literary critic during the 1930s and 1940s. Among his contemporaries, he ranked with Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, and F. O. Matthiessen. Indeed, in the preface to the posthumous, 1968 publication of his Selected Essays, which won a National Book Award, Allen Tate placed Troy among the handful of the best critics of this century. Troy's criticism was informed by an intelligence so balanced that, where many theoreticians took up positions in logical traps, he easily avoided them. At the very moment when scholars and critics were either treating literature like polemics or investigating ideas as if belles-lettres were a sub-category of history or philosophy, Troy acknowledged both the centrality of literary ideas and their distinction from ideas in other forms. When confronted with a text, he analysed it with a firm sense of its inherent meaning and of its cultural implications, in a style that expresses seriousness of commitment precisely and clearly. The Bookman presents a selection of Troy's remaining writings on such major literary figures as Henry James, e. e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Willa Cather, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Emile Zola. Troy produced a body of work that is timeless, permanent, and exemplary -- perhaps as much as, if not more so than, the work of such other critical contemporaries of his as the Anglo-Americans Yvor Winters, I. A. Richards, William Empson, George Jean Nathan, and R. P. Blackmur. Published in conjunction with Film Nation: William Troy on the Cinema, 1933-1935 (ISBN 978-1-78976-173-3), The Bookman is clear evidence of Troy's role as one of the foremost critics of his age. Inclusion of a substantive index makes the work an essential and accessible gateway to a wide range of literary criticism. See more