Looking back on [Krutch's] career, one must acknowledge certain shortcomings. Perhaps, by the most austere standards of literary history, Krutch falls short of deserving a place in the very first rank of American writers. After abjuring the effort to become "distinctly high-brow"—an effort which brought him his earliest fame but hardly his greatest happiness—his literary ambition, like his thought, became more modest and also more genuine. His search as a man for values prevailed over his search as an artist for literary perfection. As a man of letters, he wrote to his day, rather than to posterity; he hoped to be read by his contemporaries, rather than studied by his successors. And he sought to bring delight to his readers and, indirectly, profit to the world, rather than (as in his writing in the 1920s) literary glory to himself.

If he was absolute master of no...