For thirty-nine of the most eventful years in American literature (1870-1909) Richard Watson Gilder controlled or helped to control the fortunes of one of the most influential magazines in America. As assistant editor of Scribner's Monthly Magazine and as editor-in-chief of its successor, the Century Monthly Magazine, his power as an editor was second to none. But his critical writings per se, many of them never published at all and the rest confined to ephemeral publications or unindexed in his own magazines, do not provide the kind of canon one usually associates with a significant critic. An editor, from one point of view at least, may be no more obtrusively present in the literature of his time than the midwife who presides at the birth of a great man may be in his biography. Yet, from another and a more profound point of view, an editor may do...