William Troy, American Literary Critic: A Re-viewing

This review-essay reconsiders the literary criticism of the American William Troy (1903-61), a highly regarded figure during the 1930s and 1940s. Among his contemporaries, he ranked with Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, and R. P. Blackmur. At the very moment when scholars and critics were either treating literature like polemics or investigating ideas as if belles-lettres were as sub-category of history or philosophy, Troy acknowledged both the centrality of literary ideas and their distinction from ideas in other forms. In his writing on such major literary modernists as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Gide, Faulkner, Joyce, and Yeats, in addition to Shakespeare, Zola, and Aeschylus, Troy provides ample evidence that he produced a body of work that is timeless, permanent, and exemplary.