So intimate is the connection between William Phillips and the Partisan Review, which he cofounded in 1934 and continues to edit over half a century later, that it is impossible to write much about the one without writing about the other. In fact, Phillips's memoir, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (1983), is symbolic of this connection; little is revealed about the man apart from his view of the magazine and his relationships with the people who were associated with it at various times. Of the Partisan Review, Phillips has said from a relatively recent perspective, "We were clearly partisans of the new, of the tradition of the new, ... [which was] a fusion of modernist sensibility and radical consciousness." Both the magazine and its editor are also critics of culture, seeking the relation, often the continuity, between old and new, focusing on the humanities, particularly literature and...