A rich discussion with this much-admired and much-criticized American critic. Democracy per se doesn't get into it much, but the American character does, as we go from Mark Twain to soap operas to Gone with the Wind. One sample: WFB: "Well, I can't imagine, say, Mark Twain spending as much time thinking about himself as, say, Faulkner was forced to do given the dominance of the critics, which is a 20th-century phenomenon, isn't it?" LF: "No, not really.... Mark Twain worried a lot about the critics, and he worried a lot about himself, and he worried about who he was in typical American fashion, and he was always assuring people that he was not a funny fellow, and, you know, everybody laughed when he said it. And then he went home and he worried about it."