SOURCE: "Fiction Brief of a Law Factory," in Saturday Review, New York, Vol. XLVI, No. 33, August 17, 1963, pp. 15-16.

Hicks was an American literary critic whose famous study The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (1933) established him as the foremost advocate of Marxist critical thought in Depression-era America. Throughout the 1930s, he argued for a more socially engaged brand of literature and severely criticized such writers as Henry James, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton, whom he believed failed to confront the realities of their society and, instead, took refuge in their own work. After 1939, Hicks sharply denounced communist ideology, which he called a "hopelessly narrow way of judging literature," and in his later years adopted a less ideological posture in critical matters. In the following review, Hicks comments on the authenticity of Auchincloss's stories in Powers of Attorney.

During the past sixteen years Louis...