Book: Books and Men

Overview
Books and Men is a lively collection of essays by Agnes Repplier, first published in 1888, that moves fluidly between literary criticism, personal observation, and humorous moralizing. Repplier treats books as living companions and literary life as a field of social and intellectual conversation, offering judgments that are as much about readers and their habits as about authors and their works. The essays display an urbane intelligence and an appetite for both classical learning and contemporary literary debate.

Themes and Subjects
The central preoccupation is the relation between books and human character: how books form, flatter, correct, or deceive readers. Repplier examines reading as an ethical and aesthetic activity, arguing for discriminating taste and for literature that elevates rather than panders. She is suspicious of excesses, sentimentalism, sensationalism, and fashionable dogmas, while encouraging the pleasures of well-made prose, clear thought, and moral seriousness.
Alongside meditations on reading, the essays explore the social world that surrounds books: authorship, criticism, the publishing industry, and the habits of readers in salon, study, and parlor. Repplier often contrasts American literary life with European traditions, noting both the strengths of homegrown talent and the hazards of provincialism. Her interest is less in exhaustive bibliographic scholarship than in the cultural effects of literature and the personality of those who write and consume it.

Style and Tone
Repplier writes with a compact, epigrammatic style that blends wit with shrewd moral observation. Short sentences and pointed aphorisms sit alongside more reflective passages, producing a voice that is politely amused yet firmly critical when she deems it necessary. Irony and understatement are frequent devices; she rarely indulges in rhetorical excess, preferring a crisp clarity that rewards close reading.
Her tone can be playful and conversational, but it often carries an undercurrent of seriousness. The combination of light humor and earnest conviction allows Repplier to make trenchant remarks about literary fashions without alienating readers who disagree. The essays thus function as small moral essays as much as they do as pieces of literary criticism.

Approach to Criticism
Repplier's method is impressionistic rather than scholarly. She favors general principles and personal response over exhaustive exegesis, using anecdotes and character sketches to illuminate broader observations. Critics and authors are evaluated not only for technical skill but for the moral and intellectual effects their works produce. She defends a standard of taste that privileges coherence, honesty, and human sympathy.
At the same time, she recognizes that reading is a diverse activity: some books console, others provoke, and some serve purely social or conversational ends. Repplier refuses a single dogmatic standard, arguing instead for a cultivated judgment that can distinguish between different literary aims and measure them by appropriate criteria.

Historical Context and Reception
Appearing in the late 1880s, the collection reflects anxieties and enthusiasms of a moment when the book market, periodical culture, and middle-class reading habits were rapidly changing. Repplier writes as a participant in the literary conversation of her time, attentive to contemporary writers and to the shifting role of literature in public life. Her conservatism in taste and her insistence on moral seriousness resonated with many readers who sought stability amid cultural change.
The book helped establish Repplier's reputation as a graceful and incisive essayist, and it anticipated the longer career that would make her one of the most admired American essayists of her generation. Books and Men remains of interest for its elegant prose, its clear-sighted reflections on reading, and its portrait of the literary world at a pivotal moment in modern cultural life.