Books in Brief

Vital Signs: Essays on American Literature and Criticism, by James W. Tut- tleton (Ivan R. Dee, 366pp., $27.50)

THIS book approaches the status of an ideal literary object. Professor Tuttleton has managed to produce a luminous fusion of extensive scholarship and literary discernment. He succeeds in this because he has assimilated his learning and wears it lightly. Like any reader, I tend to test a book first on the things I know best. Here I find that his essays on Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald are among the most valuable I have read on those authors. His opening essay on Francis Parkman will lead many readers back to that epic American historian. Tuttleton’s rescue of Kate Chopin from the feminists is both humorous and cleansing. On the sort of contemporary criticism that directs attention away from the literary work and to the critic, he is rightly and stingingly severe. Even experts will learn much from these essays, and the general reader will be delighted. —Jeffrey Hart

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Vital Signs: Essays on American Literature and Criticism, by James W. Tut- tleton (Ivan R. Dee, 366pp., $27.50)

THIS book approaches the status of an ideal literary object. Professor Tuttleton has managed to produce a luminous fusion of extensive scholarship and literary discernment. He succeeds in this because he has assimilated his learning and wears it lightly. Like any reader, I tend to test a book first on the things I know best. Here I find that his essays on Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald are among the most valuable I have read on those authors. His opening essay on Francis Parkman will lead many readers back to that epic American historian. Tuttleton’s rescue of Kate Chopin from the feminists is both humorous and cleansing. On the sort of contemporary criticism that directs attention away from the literary work and to the critic, he is rightly and stingingly severe. Even experts will learn much from these essays, and the general reader will be delighted. —Jeffrey Hart