The Pritchett Century: A Selection of the Best by V. S. Pritchett (Modern Library Classics)

Sir Victor Pritchett disproved almost every cliché of literary life. After making a striking debut as a journalist and fiction writer during the 1920s, he not only failed to burn out in a fashionably bohemian style but got a second wind that carried him clear through the 1990s. In an age of specialization, he left his mark on a half-dozen genres--the novel, short fiction, memoir, casual essay, travel writing, and criticism. Throughout a career of such jaw-dropping duration, he resisted literary fads like the plagues that they are. Finally, he had that rarest of authorial virtues--common sense--which enlivens almost every word of The Pritchett Century. No doubt Pritchett fans will argue over what their hero did best. But his short stories, which leaven a near-Chekhovian delicacy with the driest of British wit, equal anything written in our age. And his criticism is as entertaining as it is accurate, particularly when he wrote about books he loved. (Here's Pritchett on Huckleberry Finn, for example, mixing his panegyric with a soupçon of poison: "Huck is a only a crude boy, but luckily he was drawn by a man whose own mind was arrested, with disastrous results in his other books, at the schoolboy stage; here it is perfect.") In any case, The Pritchett Century contains ample helpings of every genre, which adds up to an amazingly distinguished--let's say Victorious--anthology.