Barrett Wendell's importance was long obscured by the charge that he was nothing more than the last of the "Boston Brahmins," an eccentric Tory representative of the fading Genteel Tradition. A "master of paradoxy," as one early reviewer called him, Wendell would have been the first to agree with his critics that he was among the last scions of a dying age. But, despite his habitual self-deprecation, he was a pioneering and influential critic and educator. His advocacy of general education, his "invention" of English composition and creative writing as they are taught today, his path-breaking courses in American literature, his creation of the history and literature honors program at Harvard University, his insistence on "thinking things together" mark him as a forward-looking and, in many ways, a "modern" scholar.

Handicapped by lifelong feelings of inadequacy, he was only too aware of his lack of boldness to rebel...