SOURCE: MacDonald, William. Review of John Brown, by Oswald Garrison Villard. Nation 91, no. 2364 (20 October 1910): 357-59.

In the following review, MacDonald considers Villard's John Brown to be an important achievement in historical biography.

Of all the men who have held, for some brief space of time, the eye of the American people, none has evoked more diverse estimates of his character, motives, or achievements, or stirred more deeply or lastingly the fountains of enthusiastic praise and bitter hate, than John Brown of Osawatomie. The student of American history finds him acclaimed, on the one hand, as the saviour of Kansas, the chief agent in negro emancipation, and the one sure forerunner of the civil war; and, on the other, denounced as a half-crazy religious enthusiast running amuck in the modern world, a fanatical leader of wild and hopeless enterprises, a criminal, and even a murderer. A whole literature of...