‘You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better.” That was Stephen Vincent Benet in 1941, in the Saturday Review of Literature, on the work of Scott Fitzgerald, who had recently died.
I thought of it on the death of Tom Wolfe. Not that he was ignored or forgotten, but we are coming to terms with his greatness in a purer, less guarded way than in the past.
He...