THE CRITICAL FATE of O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! has been, to say the least of it, peculiar. Nowadays we look with horror at the intentional fallacy; yet we have scrutinized O'Neill's statements about Ah, Wilderness! and derived attitudes therefrom. At present a writer's life is considered almost an irrelevancy; yet Ah, Wilderness! has been attacked because O'Neill's adolescence was obviously never like that. Nowadays we are enjoined to look, at all costs, at the work itself; yet we have turned back to O'Neill's earlier works, and, finding Ah, Wilderness! to be very different, we have, according to our biases, either smiled with relief at the mellowness and simplicity or winced in pain at what seemed sentimental, superficial, and false.