Notable writers on literature and culture who occasionally penned opinion pieces on the movies prior to World War II include Clifton Fadiman, Mark Van Doren, Lincoln Kirstein, Edmund Wilson, Louise Bogan, and Paul Goodman. All of these critics wrote seriously about things other than the movies. Indeed, the early decades of film criticism drew many moonlighters who tried their hand at it for a few years, then moved on to their preferred metier. And such was the case with William Troy (19031961). Troy, a distinguished literary critic whose posthumous Selected Essays won a National Book Award in 1968, was also a much-loved professor at Bennington College, the New School, and New York University. Troy was the film critic of The Nation from 1933 to 1935. To that post he brought an educated, almost professional tone, which he sometimes used for comic effect. He approached each piece of film criticism as an occasion for some larger essayistic rumination. Indeed, his feeling for the carpentry of the short review is superb, as the reader will detect in his pieces on such important films as Bunuels Lge dor, Langs M, Duviviers Poil de Carotte, Eisensteins Que Viva Mexico!, Dreyers The Passion of Joan of Arc, Cocteaus Blood of a Poet, Pudovkins Mother, Flahertys Man of Aran, Renoirs Madame Bovary, and Fords The Informer. William Troy was thus one of Americas first full-time professional film critics, if not the best of the lot. He deserves some of the attention heretofore reserved for another important early critic, James Agee, who himself began writing movie reviews for The Nation in 1942. Published in conjunction with The Bookman: William Troy on Literature and Criticism, 19271950 (ISBN 978-1-78976-172-6), Film Nation is essential reading for cinephiles. Inclusion of a substantive index makes the work highly attractive for classroom adoption in the field of cinema studies.
