The greatest critics help us understand the greatest of poets and novelists; but sometimes the opposite is also true. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 19th-century France wrote marvelous essays on literature, which are perfectly readable today. Yet if you want to get at Sainte-Beuve’s deeper instincts, you should read him in the light cast by his brilliant friend Victor Hugo. Edmund Wilson was Sainte-Beuve’s intellectual heir in the United States — the man who figured out how to write Sainte-Beuve-like essays in American English. Yet Wilson, too, makes a little more sense if you read him in a light cast by Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald — Wilson’s novel-writing friends and contemporaries. –Paul Berman, 2003, The New York Times