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Because Saul Bellow and the influential Philip Rahv had both dismissed “The Breast,” the plan was to rebuff and rebut his critics in a significant literary venue.

Many of the writers Winters most admired wound up in Rahv’s paleface pantheon—Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James.

The argument anticipated a still famous intervention made by Philip Rahv in the Kenyon Review the following year.

Irving Howe, the chief booster of “Stoner” during the nineteen-sixties, was an Emerson skeptic, a Rahv disciple, a colleague of Winters and Cunningham, an enemy of Fiedler; he accused novelists of merely reflecting the “shapeless” character of modern experience, disliked “the gratuitous verbalism” of “The Adventures of Augie March,” and slammed “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Writers like James Baldwin and Irving Howe would drop by the office, and at Greenwich Village parties he met prominent intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and the Partisan Review editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips.