Looking back on [Krutch's] career, one must acknowledge certain shortcomings. Perhaps, by the most austere standards of literary history, Krutch falls short of deserving a place in the very first rank of American writers. After abjuring the effort to become "distinctly high-brow"—an effort which brought him his earliest fame but hardly his greatest happiness—his literary ambition, like his thought, became more modest and also more genuine. His search as a man for values prevailed over his search as an artist for literary perfection. As a man of letters, he wrote to his day, rather than to posterity; he hoped to be read by his contemporaries, rather than studied by his successors. And he sought to bring delight to his readers and, indirectly, profit to the world, rather than (as in his writing in the 1920s) literary glory to himself.

If he was absolute master of no single literary genre, he worked skillfully in many. The versatility of his writing, the many-sidedness of his interests, and the range of topics treated in his works—a breadth which makes his career as a whole such an interesting one—prevented Krutch from achieving that depth which might have brought him even greater, if different, recognition as a clearly preeminent figure on any one ground. Intellectual fashion may underrate the value of the nonspecialist perspective Krutch brought to so much of his writing. But for many readers the modest, earnest enthusiasm and conviction of the amateur that characterized both his life and his writing was precisely the quality which constituted the distinctive attraction of his later essays and books.

It may, in fact, be fair to say that Krutch's gifts were more verbal than intellectual. He broke little new ground in the history of thought, and in many of his works his greatest achievement was to gather and synthesize some of the best that others had thought and said, revivifying and making popularly available that traditional wisdom. His effort as a popularizer was so successful largely because of Krutch's extraordinary verbal gift—his capacity, that is, for forceful and peculiarly unhackneyed utterance. As he addressed his general reader, he employed a prose as warm and unpretentious as his ideas, a style which, like his mind, was clear, sober, flexible, and tempered by unobtrusive with and self-effacing irony. If (as someone once said) literature is journalism worth reading twice, even Krutch's essentially journalistic reviewing often achieves the state of literature. Had he no other distinction, Krutch will be remembered as the author of some of the most distinguished prose in modern letters.

To read and study from beginning to end the entire corpus of Krutch's fifty enormously productive years as a man of letters is to put his writings to a severe test. Inevitably, the nearly three dozen books he wrote or edited and his several thousand reviews, editorials, and essays are not all of equal excellence. Indeed, his most substantial accomplishments, his unquestionably significant work, might seem even greater were it not surrounded by other writing which seems trivial and ephemeral by comparison. But whatever the shortcomings of Krutch's career, one is inclined to regret rather than to scorn them in one's admiration for the achievement his life of writing represents.

In retrospect, it is perhaps less any single work than the shape of Krutch's life and works as a whole which remains most memorable. Coming up from Tennessee with an acute and capacious but relatively unstocked mind, he spent the better part of the following half-century defining an intellectual position that was authentically his own. Most of his works—including many of those with apparently slight autobiographical significance—reflect that lifelong effort at self-discovery. Early on, even as he tried to embrace modernism, he was confounded by his age and sought to achieve an understanding, different from that of many of his contemporaries, of what it means to be human. His life was one of continuous discovery—or, more precisely, rediscovery—of what is truly essential. Believing in that individualism of which he had written as an undergraduate, he found happiness in a world in which he never felt wholly at home. And through Johnson, Thoreau, and his study of nature he found a new faith in some of those basic human values effectively denied by modernism, Marxism, behaviorism, and other contemporary -isms. For many other people who shared his sensibility and, through his books and essays, followed him in his quest, Krutch's intellectual and spiritual odyssey was exemplary.

His revelation of that quest was neither maudlin nor truculently self-advertising. Like the man, it was modest and understated, earnest and sincere. He was such a popular writer (and, for many readers, so important a thinker) because, in ambitiously tackling difficult intellectual and social problems, he was able to address some of the crucial issues of his day in terms comprehensible for the general reader. Refusing to align himself with any literary or intellectual school or coterie, and never resting complacently in any simple doctrine or dogma, he remained steadfastly his own man. As an independent thinker he resisted the pressures of his times. As a humanist he bore witness to convictions about man and nature, convictions he found more fundamental than those of an age which tried to live by principles different from his own. And as a writer he offered an account of the possibility of that resistance and the importance of those convictions—an account to which many readers will continue to turn, with delight to themselves and with profit to the world. (pp. 230-32)