Contemporaries: [Essays]

I: The background of modern literature

II: Relevance of the American past

Ishmael and Ahab

Dry light and hard expressions

Thoreau's lost journal

Called back

Good old Howells

Stephen Crane's scarlet woman

A leftover transcendentalist: John Jay Chapman

And the war came

III: Old boys, mostly American

Dreiser: the esthetic of realism

The mystery of Gertrude Stein

Lady Chatterley in America

The youngest man who ever was

Sinclair Lewis: hail and farewell

John P. Marquand and the American failure

William Faulkner: the stillness of "Light in August"

William Faulkner: more Snopeses

William Faulkner: the short stories

Graham Greene and the age of absurdity

The great American bore

IV: Famous since the war

A brilliant boy from the midlands

The southern "City of the soul"

Nelson Algren on the wild side

Good-bye to James Agee

Lawrence Durrell's rosy-finger'd Egypt

The posthumous life of Dylan Thomas

Bernard Malamud: the magic and the dread

The alone generation

The world of Saul Bellow

Gravity and grace: the stories of J. F. Powers

In praise of Robert Lowell

J. D. Salinger: "Everybody's favorite"

Brendan Behan: the causes go, the rebels remain

How good is Norman Mailer?

Truman Capote and the army of wrongness

The essays of James Baldwin

Tough-minded Mr. Roth

V: The European current

The plant, man, is more robust and large in Rome than elsewhere

Sholom Aleichem: the old country

Thomas Mann: or the German as novelist

The saint as schlemiel

Facing it

A condemned man: Albert Camus

The least of these

No sky for Renaud

VI: Places

Gastprofessor fur̈ Amerikanistik

In Puerto Rico

From a Russian diary

Pasternak's wake

At ease in Zion

VII: Freud and his consequences

Sigmund Freud, 1856-1956: portrait of a hero

Psychoanalysis and literary culture today

The lesson of the master

The Conquistador: or Freud in his letters

The language of pundits

VIII: The puzzle of modern society

The uses of experience

Old revolutionists: Dwight Macdonald

Edmund Wilson on the thirties

The ghost of Leon Trotsky

The historian at the center

The education of T. S. Matthews

What's wrong with culture

Art is good for you

The village today: or the music the money makes

Youth is a pressure group

Eichmann and the new Israelis

The president and other intellectuals

IX: The critic's task

Writing for magazines

Saints for our time

Father Rexroth and the beats

Tynan's theater

The poet against the English department

The function of criticism today.