Please Mr. Rip Van Winkle, Wake Up Some More

The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, by Edmund Wilson. Farrar, $2.95 Edmund Wilson’s Protest is a document of no mean interest. The author has one of the best literary minds of our generation. He has developed a limpid and casual prose in the great tradition of essay writing in English. His criticism exhibits a rare combination of qualities. He has humor and a very personal sensitivity to whimsical human nuances. Besides being a historical critic and an able journalist of literature he is a scholar; as John Adams said of Jefferson: “a great rubber-off of dust.”

There can hardly be a subject more appealing and timely than the misadventure of a man of talent caught in the bureaucratic web of the Internal Revenue Service. It is one of those situations that Kafka prophetically foresaw. Vivian Kellems told the story from the point of view of small business. Now we have it from the point of view of the absent-minded professor who is also one of our ranking men of letters.

JD

About the Author

John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was an acclaimed American novelist and frequent contributor to National Review.

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The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, by Edmund Wilson. Farrar, $2.95 Edmund Wilson’s Protest is a document of no mean interest. The author has one of the best literary minds of our generation. He has developed a limpid and casual prose in the great tradition of essay writing in English. His criticism exhibits a rare combination of qualities. He has humor and a very personal sensitivity to whimsical human nuances. Besides being a historical critic and an able journalist of literature he is a scholar; as John Adams said of Jefferson: “a great rubber-off of dust.”

There can hardly be a subject more appealing and timely than the misadventure of a man of talent caught in the bureaucratic web of the Internal Revenue Service. It is one of those situations that Kafka prophetically foresaw. Vivian Kellems told the story from the point of view of small business. Now we have it from the point of view of the absent-minded professor who is also one of our ranking men of letters.