Of Time and the River, as essentially submitting undigested first drafts to be transformed into finished work by others. According to DeVoto, Wolfe's writing was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by [his editor] Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners." Although in passing acknowledging Wolfe's genius, DeVoto excoriated his lack of artistry, "Mr. Wolfe ... has written some of the finest fiction in our day. But a great part of what he writes is not fiction at all: it is only material with which he has struggled but which has defeated him." "Until Mr. Wolfe develops more craftsmanship, he will not be the important novelist he is now widely accepted as being." DeVoto's essay was a decisive factor in Wolfe's subsequent cutting ties with Scribners and editor Maxwell Perkins shortly before his death in 1938 and had a devastating effect on Wolfe's posthumous literary reputation. The decade between 1943 and 53 saw the completion of what John L. Thomas called Devoto's "magnificent trilogy of the discovery, settling, and exploitation of the West":<ref>John L. Thomas, A Country of the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and the American Land(Routledge: 2013), p. 6.</ref> The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943); Across the Wide Missouri (1947); The Course of Empire (1952). Across the Wide Missouri was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for History (1948) and The Course of Empire received National Book Award for Nonfiction (1953). He also edited a selection of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953). A book on the history, geography, and ecology of the American West remained unfinished at his death in 1955; in 2001, an edited version was published as Western Paradox. Accusations of Communism As early as 1938, when the Dies Committee was investigating radical professors and a Soviet takeover of America, DeVoto "mocked the conspiracy nuts" and yet was called "fascist" by the Left. In the 1950s, he felt "a Communist or two on any faculty constituted a far smaller danger than the procedures that would be necessary to keep them off." He also opposed the outlawing of the Communist Party USA. "Historian Bernard DeVoto spoke for many liberals" in disdaining "the prominence ex-communists had gained in public life during the Cold War." He argued that despite the new-found patriotism of conservative ex-Communists, their commitments to absolutism and authoritarianism remained the same and continued to threaten freedom. In April 1953,