First Reader

THE LIVING NOVEL (256 pp.)—V. S. Pritchett—Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

As a literary critic—and he is one of the best of them—Victor Sawdon Pritchett came to his job late and without having his head stuffed with literature courses. He had very little formal education. The result is that he reads books in his own way, and writes about great authors as though he were the first to read them.

"Except to the bookish," he writes, "many of what are called the Standard Novelists have the set air of an officially appointed committee. We had fallen...