SOURCE: O'Connor, William Van. “The New Humanism.” In An Age of Criticism: 1900-1950, pp. 92-109. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952.

In the following essay, O'Connor summarizes attacks on the New Humanists in the late 1920s and discusses their influence on other critics.

During the postwar years reductive naturalism had made debunking biographies, drab fiction, and behaviorist drama seem inevitable. Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and their followers were among those who most firmly resisted the tenets of reductive naturalism and the kinds of literature to which it gave rise.¹ The New Humanists were looked upon variously as defenders of the genteel tradition, as reactionaries, as enemies of democracy, or as defenders of traditional values, upholders of the moral order, and so forth.

The war waged by and against the New Humanists, with its lulls, its forays, and the final tremendous battle in 1929-30, involved almost every critic and scholar...