SOURCE: "The Passing of James Huneker," in The Nation, New York, Vol. CXXIX, No. 3364, December 25, 1929, p. 780.

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 but after 1939 sharply denounced communist ideology and adopted a less ideological posture in critical matters. In the following essay, Hicks disputes the reasoning behind Huneker's impressionistic criticism while praising the author for the gusto of his opinions.

Reading Huneker's essays today, one feels creeping over one the revolting suspicion that James Huneker, that great iconoclast, godfather of Mencken and all the Menckenites, was nothing but a sort of Hamilton Wright Mabie with a perverse streak of naughtiness and with somewhat better luck in choosing the...