Who's Who in Twentieth-Century Literature

I first stumbled onto this book as an English major in college, and I found it fascinating. This volume--not quite 600 pages of encyclopedia-style entries of 20th Century authors--struck me as a usefully coherent overview of modern letters, as presented by someone who seems to have absorbed the whole of literature. Like fellow critic Harold Bloom, Martin Seymour-Smith has apparently read everything. The book's most appealing quality is also its biggest weakness: Seymour-Smith is an almost unbelievably biased critic. Listen to him on Sinclair Lewis: "Lewis is only of socio-anthropological interest; as a writer, he is almost worthless." Or John Barth: "ingenious, clever, admirable--and a crushing bore." Or Yukio Mishima: "evil and cruel... no more than a nasty little boy." He spends far too much time examining the personalities of the authors, and he pretends to know more about them than, I think, he has a right to believe; the Mishima quote above is all too typical.He is also capable of highly eccentric critical judgments. Very, very few critics have ever judged Wyndham Lewis as "without question the greatest English-language writer of the century." He takes a surprisingly dim view of many writers commonly considered among the preeminent of the century--Eliot, Yeats, Mann, Nabokov, Hemingway, Shaw. (To be fair, though, he's very often dead on the money, championing oft-overlooked authors like Francois Mauriac, Robert Walser, Robert Musil, others.) His prose style is often needlessly convoluted. He's terribly fond of cramming long parenthetical asides into the middle of sentences.Nonetheless, one has to respect Seymour-Smith's positions, even if they're sometimes difficult to agree with. The book is, above all, a valuable reference guide for "serious" readers looking for suggestions about what to read next. (I have myself discovered more than a few obscure but worthwhile authors from this volume.) If you read it in this light, and not as the gospel truth, then you'll likely get a lot out of it.