Alfred Kazin

The Great Ideas Today attempts to relate the outstanding events of contemporary life and thought to the accumulated wisdom of the past. To the extent that it succeeds in doing this, it reveals the relevance of the great books to the contemporary scene and throws the light of the great ideas on the...

History is made up of facts, but also of opinions; it is not only, asLeopold von Ranke put it, "what actually happened/' but also what peoplewho know what happened think about past events. Facts are often difficultto track down and verify, but once located they are immutable and per-manently...

Preface To those of us who were keeping up with contemporary novels in high school in the 1920s, John Dos Passos seemed to be an important writer. Some of us didn't read Three Soldiers (1921) until several years after it came out, but when we did discover the book, it was a shock, for as small...