Ten years ago Archibald MacLeish published a prose collection called A Continuing Journey; it was a public book, addresses and essays on topics ranging from literary theory to the fate of the nation. Now he has published a new prose collection, Riders on the Earth; this one is a private book, filled with MacLeish's reminiscences, meditations, and convictions. They reveal behind the fine mind a generous spirit.

There are two kinds of essays here. In the more formal ones MacLeish examines the course of humanism in the last decade and makes a case for its future. In the others he discusses, fondly but with unsoftened clarity, his own past and the lives and careers of some of his friends and colleagues. He is the last of the race of literary giants that created modernism, and he has had to write these eulogies for some time now. (pp. cxxvi, cxxviii)

MacLeish has, and has long had, a bad name in literary circles that call themselves sophisticated because he is an optimist. Indeed, examining the events of the late sixties, MacLeish finds grounds for hope where many have seen despair. (p. cxxviii)

MacLeish's optimism is not born of naiveté; we should be naive to presume it of a man whose close friends have included not only Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway but also Niels Bohr and Franklin Roosevelt. The very range of his experience is astonishing. Perhaps the best reason we might have to take heart about our own futures is the optimism of a man such as this. (p. cxxx)