Essays: Personal & Impersonal

In 1988, at the age of 72, Milton Hindus, Brandeis professor and biographer and critic of Proust, Céline, Whitman, and Reznikoff, collected his miscellaneous essays. Some of them are personal (memoir and autobiography), others impersonal (criticism). The emphasis, Hindus writes, is on criticism “and the autobiographical revelations are present for whatever light they may shed upon the choice of subjects and the attitudes expressed in the criticism. My conviction is that the most important life is that of the mind, and if this does not transpire through all the author’s work, then indeed he has written in vain.”