For more than half a century, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) cast a long shadow across the landscape of American literary criticism, forming our views of luminaries like Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway and enhancing our understanding of dozens of others. A transplanted but long-time New Englander, Cowley focused much of his critical attention on the region's plethora of eminent authors, and this collection combines those essays with his writings about the New England he knew and loved. Cowley is equally at home with Hawthorne, James, Emerson, Melville, Frost, Aiken, Cheever, Cummings - and the characters and customs of his adoptive region. In a poem included here, Cowley writes of his wish to love the earth and to speak some words in patterns that will be remembered. This book is testimony to his gift for - and fulfillment of - both.