In The Rarer Action (Rutgers, 1970), a volume in tribute to Francis Fergusson, the critic Allen Tate wrote: "The Idea of a Theater is a work comparable in range and depth with Eric Auerbach's Mimesis.
[4] He then received a Rhodes Scholarship and studied briefly at Oxford University before traveling to France where he befriended Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company.
Returning to New York City, he took acting classes with the Polish director Richard Boleslavski and wrote drama criticism for the Herald Tribune.
In the early 1930s he founded the drama division of the then new Bennington College in southwestern Vermont.
Among his students were poet Robert Pinsky[5] and fiction writer Alan Cheuse.