This new edition of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters brings back into print one of the classic works of modern literary history. First published in 1969, when its subject, although already declared an anachronism in the academy, had not yet been swamped by the rising tide of literary theory, this study of the English man of letters was itself an admirable addition to the tradition it anatomized. It is a tradition that began, for all practical purposes, with the publication of the Edinburgh Review in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and is thus a distinctly modern phenomenon. What John Gross gave us in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters was a vivid account of the crucial place it had come to occupy in the cultural life of the modern world at the very moment when the legitimacy of the man-of-letters tradition was more and more under attack. At once a celebration of that tradition and an inquiry into its troubled condition, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters did more than any other study of its kind to remind us of what would be lost to contemporary cultural life if we allowed it to be destroyed by the forces already arrayed against its survival.

In his new introduction to this paperback edition of the book, Mr. Gross describes what his purposes were in writing it. “When I began sketching it out, in 1966,” he writes,