The essential Paul Elmer More;: A selection of his writings

The great American author, editor, statesman and scholar Walter Lippmann wrote the following about Paul Elmer More, "To read him is to enter an austere and elevated realm of ideas and to know a man who, in the guise of a critic, is authentically concerned with the first and last things of human experience." That is an assessment with which I wholeheartedly concur. I would add the following. In his preface to "Reflections on a Ravaged Century", historian Robert Conquest observed, "...the main responsibility for the century's disasters lies not so much in the problems as in the solutions, not in impersonal forces but in human beings thinking certain thoughts and as a result performing certain actions." At the close of the twentieth century Conquest looked back on the bad ideas and horrible consequences that plagued mankind in the form of evil ideologies such as Communism and National Socialism. At the dawn of the same century More looked at the same bad ideas and foresaw the horrible consequences. Conquest was reflective, More was prophetic. It is with sadness that I note More's works are now out of print, while at the beginning of the twenty-first century our academy is awash in the intellectual sewerage spewed forth by the likes of Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Chomsky and Said. "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country".