In his autobiography, More Lives than One (1962), Joseph Wood Krutch modestly recounts his "lives" as a well-known drama critic and associate editor for The Nation, a distinguished professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University, an influential interpreter of the modern age, and a meticulous observer of and reporter on the natural world. His many books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles reflect major ideas and movements in American culture from the early 1900s well into the atomic age. The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (1929), a bleak assessment of Western culture after World War I, in which he argues that the modern age has abandoned human values in pursuit of technology, was highly acclaimed as an insightful appraisal of "The Age of Anxiety." A reassessment of those earlier views, The Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival, and the Modern Temper (1954), won the National Book...