Eric Adler is professor of classics at University of Maryland and author of classics,

The Culture Wars, and Beyond.

He has edited a collection of letters entitled Humanistic Letters,

the Irving Babbitt Paul Elmer Moore Correspondence. That's our topic for conversation.

Welcome, Professor Adler. Thank you so much for having me, Mark.

This is a pretty big volume of letters, and you write a substantial introduction to it.

But why don't you first just give us a quick bio of the parties of the correspondents?

Who was Irving Babbitts and who was Paul Elmer Moore?

Yes, so Irving Babett and Paul Elmer Moore were two major intellectual figures from the early part of the 20th century.

They were the two leading lights of the so-called new humanism, an informal movement of social

and literary criticism that was very influential in American and European and even Chinese

intellectual circles in the 1920s and into the 1930s.

They both lived from the 1860s until the 1930s.

Babbitt was a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University and wrote was a kind of major public intellectual as well.

And Paul Elmer Moore was a sometime professor. He taught at Brin Moore

for some time and taught at Princeton for some time too, but he was also an editor and literary

critic. And he had in fact been, among other things, the editor-in-chief of the Nation magazine from

1909 to 1914. And the two of them together led this informal but very

influential movement, intellectual movement in the United States.

That was my next question. The New Humanism. Give us a few of the characteristics, basic

principles of the new humanism, which they were prominent leaders of. Yeah. So

the new humanism was an attempt to reconnect to the historical humanist movement, which was

...