The Wine of Absurdity

An absorbing exploration of the religious uses of imagination and the imaginative quality of faith as revealed in the work of outstanding twentieth-century writers who exemplify refusal of the absurd, who admit its presence and delineate it, but then construct a solace or defense against it.

The author examines the writings of W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Camus, Sartre and Malraux and extends his analysis to such unorthodox converts as T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, and Graham Greene. He concludes with a discussion of George Santanyana and American uses of myth. "Each of the writers I discuss," he says in his preface, "devises or accepts something that mitigates the absurdity of being human, and the wine of absurdity is the imaginative effort entailed as well as the imaginative end product."