The career of Herbert Read spanned vast and varied times and types of literature--Edwardian to postmodern--and art--art nouveau to pop art. His bibliography is a spill of creative and critical literature, in standard forms and genres and their modern mutations--such as radio lectures--with isolated anomalies--like his philosophical, and sole, novel, The Green Child: A Romance (1935)--and patchwork collections of revised periodical pieces and academic addresses. James King's biography of Read, The Last Modern (1990), is full of Read's indecision, false starts, wrong turns, conflicting desires, and divided loyalties. He had little intellectual pedigree but definitive intellectual strengths: the impulse and satisfaction of appreciation and what he would have characterized as his Yorkshire stock but which can be found in poor-school poets and working-class hacks across cultures and centuries, a genius for labor. He was knighted as England's homegrown hero of twentieth-century sensibility, but he was always, despite his title...