Defense

To the Editors:

I hope The New York Review of Books will not be satisfied with what amounts to a brief caricature, rather than a serious review, of Jonah Raskin’s The Mythology of Imperialism.

This book is the best study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English novelists that I have read. It sheds an altogether new light on such fascinating and complex writers as Kipling, Conrad, Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and the rest.

I only wish your brief note on this book had been able to get at the real literary content, rather than getting tangled up in spurious political references. I might add that I think Jonah Raskin is the best new literary critic I have read in years.

Maxwell Geismar

Harrison, New York