ABSTRACT
Canby (1878–1961) was an American critic and literary historian. Author of biographies of Thoreau and Whitman, he also served as literary editor for the New York Evening Post (1920–4) and founded the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924, serving as its editor until 1936. Canby helped to organize the Yale Review and was editor-in-chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club (1926–58). In his autobiography, American Memoir (1947), he wrote: ‘Dos Passos invented a kind of literary television, calculated to put the new background of noise, movement, and confusion against which Americans were living, into a novel like a motion picture but without its plot. He made a sensation in Europe, for this was the way America looked to them in photographs and sounded in American newspapers. But I doubt whether his books have enduring quality. There is too much of the “stunt” in them; too much of the visual and auditory; too little depth and wisdom’ (342–3).
