SOURCE: "No Rules for What Sherwood Anderson Tried to Do," in New York Herald Tribune Book Review, April 8, 1951, p. 3.

An American critic, editor, poet, translator, and historian, Cowley has made valuable contributions to contemporary letters with his editions of the works of such American authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Ernest Hemingway. In the review below, he argues that Howe was not the critic best suited to discuss Anderson's works but nonetheless finds Howe's treatment satisfactory.

Among their other duties the four editors of the American Men of Letters Series—Joseph Wood Krutch, Margaret Marshall, Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren—have to serve as marriage brokers and officiating clergymen. They find an American author whose life and work should be revaluated, they find what they hope will be an appropriate critic and they bring them together in holy wedlock. The marriage lines are a publisher's contract...