The most versatile of American critics, James Gibbons Huneker wrote about music, drama, and art as well as literature. As the preeminent aesthetic journalist in America between 1890 and 1920, unlike typical academic critics of the period he was willing to commit himself on living artists; in fact, he sought them out. Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, and James Joyce; Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, and Arnold Schönberg; Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse-these were only a few of his prize foreign catches. "Almost singlehanded," says Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds (1942), "he brought the new currents of European art and thought to America and made them fashionable." He also encouraged the most daring and enduring American composers, playwrights, painters, sculptors, fictionists, and poets of his day, a contribution not fully revealed until the appearance, almost sixty-five years after his death, of Americans in the Arts: Critiques...