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Through all this raving, Krim is performing a traditional and by now boring rite, the attack on intelligence, upon the largely successful attempt of the magazines he castigates to liberate American writing from local color and other varieties of romantic corn.

God knows that Partisan and the rest often were, and remain, guilty of intellectual flatulence.

Sociological jargon, Germano-Slavic approximations to English, third-rate but modish fiction, and outrages to common sense have often disfigured Partisan, and in lesser degree, the other magazines on the list.

What Krim ignores, in his contempt for history and for accuracy, is that these magazines, Partisan foremost, brought about a genuine revolution in the American mind from the mid-thirties to approximately 1950.

The most obvious characteristic of contemporary American writing, apart from the beat nonsense, is its cosmopolitanism.