[In the following review, the critic wishes that the targets of Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without included more of the "beefy sacred cows" of English literature.]

[Fifty Works of English∗ Literature We Could Do Without] are 50 more or less sanctified old literary birds, habitat Eng. Lit., some still fluttering their wings in the halls of Academe, others so thoroughly fossilized one wonders at the waste of ammunition. They are works of English (∗and American) literature the authors could do without, and they largely turn out to be works most of us have been doing without from the moment they were thrust into our unwilling hands early on the road to Graduation Day.

Thus we learn, to our surprise, that Beowulf is really a terrible bore and "dreadfully long," that The Dream of Gerontius (does anyone remember a word of it?) is dreary doggerel, that Whitman was a repressed(?) homosexual who wrote execrable poetry and that Maugham was a middle-brow. Well, if that were all, we could turn back to our bedside copies of The Faerie Queene, but that isn't quite all. This is primarily a blast at the fusty caretakers of the Eng. Lit. syllabus, and as such it is effective. But when the authors let fly at bigger game, notably T. S. Eliot, Hemingway and Faulkner, with some deadly bullets doux, they make one wish they had concentrated on more of these beefy sacred cows instead of all those bedraggled sitting ducks.