Van Wyck Brooks was the first American critic of the 1920s generation to explore the social causes and unconscious motives which underlie and mold the creative and intellectual life in America. This penetrating new work, based on a large number of unpublished letters between Brooks and his wife in the 1905-30period, and containing an appendix of fourteen essays written late in life by Brooks, is an unsentimentalized appraisal of Brooks's...