William K. Wimsatt's academic and critical career, spent almost entirely at Yale University, is a record of conservative originality based on the received values of a literary canon which was evaluated according to heightened rhetorical analysis, some tenets of Aristotelianism, a careful reworking--but subordination--of the biographical record to the literary text, and a persistently Christian moral impulse. Late in his life he sought to understand the recent play of literary criticism, but this moral impulse led him to find it, particularly in its French manifestations, redundant and trivial.

William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr., was born in Washington, D.C., on 17 November 1907 to William Kurtz Wimsatt, a wholesale lumber dealer, and Bertha Stuart McSherry Wimsatt. He received his B.A. (1928) and A.M. (1929) from Georgetown University. For five years, beginning in 1930, Wimsatt was head of the English department at the Portsmouth Priory School, and he studied and taught at Catholic...