ABSTRACT
The author hasn’t changed my life, doesn’t qualify as a Neglected Figure, wouldn’t be thrilled (might be amused) at the idea of being rattled on about for a stretch in print. He bears an unexciting name—Charles Horton Cooley. He was long dead when I began reading him. (Cooley’s dates are 1864-1929.) In his most attractive book—Life and the Student (1927)—he set down his thoughts on “our time,” human nature, the university and literature in odd little not quite epigrammatic, often contradictory paragraphs, four or five to the page. (Far from fretting about the contradictions, Cooley relished them.)
