Pieces of Resistance is a collection of essays and essay-reviews written over a period of twenty-five years, 1960–85. It responds to the political, cultural, and literary changes that occurred during that period as these changes expressed themselves in the writings of novelists and critics and in the “personalities” of certain influential magazines. The exemplary figures are Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, and V. S. Naipaul, among others, that is, writers with a particular sensitivity to ideological tendencies in the literary imagination and the cultural life that distort and diminish our understanding of the world. My own critical stance shares their resistance to these tendencies, hence the title of my collection. The journals that I discuss are The New York Review, Commentary, and The Evergreen Review, which over the years and particularly in the late sixties and early seventies provided illuminating intersections of political, cultural, and literary themes. Eros, radical politics, pornography, avantgardism, racism, and Stalinism are among the themes that crop up in various forms in these essays, themes of continuing interest.

Not all the essays in this collection are polemical. A number of essays – for instance, those on Bashevis Singer, Daniel Fuchs, and Meyer Liben – are interpretations of works of imagination that speak to personal experience and have moved me. Fuchs and Liben are not writers central to American literary life, but they have a power and charm that deserve serious consideration.