John Berryman, and Robert Lowell. Writing career Literary criticism A revised version of Bawer's dissertation was published under the same title in 1986. Reviewing the book in The New Criterion, James Atlas called the "character analyses... shrewdly intuitive and sympathetic", found Bawer's "explanation for why the poets of the Middle Generation were so obsessed with [T.S.] Eliot especially persuasive", and described Bawer as "an impressive textual critic" with a "casual and self-assured" critical voice. In Commonweal Magazine, Robert Phillips called Bawer "a critic of the first order, one of the best we have today". The book was named an Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association. Bawer contributed to the arts journal The New Criterion every month between October 1983 and May 1993. A New York Times Magazine article "The Changing World of New York Intellectuals", foregrounded the contributors to The New Criterion, observing that "The youthful contributors to Hilton Kramer's magazine—Bruce Bawer, Mimi Kramer, Roger Kimball—are still in their 20s, but they manage to sound like the British critic F.R. Leavis. Their articles are full of pronouncements about 'moral values,' 'the crisis in the humanities,' 'the significance of art.' Their mission is to defend American culture against shoddy merchandise, and they don't shirk from the task." During the 1980s, Bawer also contributed book reviews to The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post Book World, The Washington Times, The American Scholar, Poetry, London Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement. He served as an editor of the short-lived magazine Arrival, based in California, in 1987–88, was a member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and editor of the NBCC Journal in 1989–90. Bawer spent two years (1991–93) as University Preceptor at Adelphi University. In recent years, he has written considerably less literary criticism than he did in the 1980s. Much of it has appeared in The Hudson Review. Early books In 1987, his book The Contemporary Stylist was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The year after, Graywolf Press issued Diminishing Fictions, a collection of essays on the modern novel. Reviewing it in the Chicago Tribune, Jack Fuller complained of "sour notes", such as "undeserved sneers", but concluded that "What redeems Bawer's excesses is the persuasive case he makes that he is on a desperate rescue mission." Graywolf published Bawer's second collection of essays on fiction, The Aspect of