Word: devoto
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...such a well-mannered magazine as the Saturday Review of Literature, the experience was a shock - but the shock was not limited to the magazine. In 1936 a scrappy, pug-nosed man from Utah took over as editor. His name, Bernard DeVoto, soon became a synonym for the atrabilious type of crusader who seems perpetually to be throwing a tantrum. Sinclair Lewis, one of his early targets, called him "a tedious and egotistical fool . . . a pompous and boresome liar." "What," asked Critic Edmund Wilson, "is Mr. DeVoto's real grievance . . . this continual boiling up about other people...
Over the years, Bernard DeVoto did indeed strike wildly, but more often than not he struck home. On speakers' platforms, in his books, and from "The Easy Chair" in Harper's Magazine, he lectured the nation on everything from its airplane service to its conservation policies to the methods of the FBI. He deplored, denounced, defied, but he seemed to do so out of a passionate fondness for America that made even the tiniest fault seem an outrage. He called himself a "critic of culture." He was actually a challenge. "We have fought at Arques," he recently told...
Semi-Educated. DeVoto's battles began early. The "child of an apostate Mormon and an apostate Catholic," he entered the University of Utah at 17, founded...
...Twain papers, produced three books (Mark Twain's America, Mark Twain in Eruption, Mark Twain at Work) that rescued Twain from the pryings of psychoanalytical critics. His interest in Twain was characteristic of his down-to-earth Americanism: while his fellow writers were busy exiling themselves to Europe, DeVoto remained stubbornly rooted...
...they saw around them was only their own. He despised writers with delusions about the writer's importance ("The importance of literary people is chiefly to one another"), and he insisted that literary criticism was "an activity in which uncontrolled speculation is virtuous and responsibility is almost impossible." DeVoto was a man in search of facts. The facts he liked best: those that lay behind the building of America...