In 1939, another critic, Philip Rahv, wrote a defining essay entitled "Paleface and Redskin" that presciently put the current dispute into perspective almost 70 years before Kirn took up the job of ambushing Wood.

American literature, Rahv said, divided between two polar types, redskin and paleface, creating "a dissociation between energy and sensibility." The redskins were spontaneous, emotional, rebellious, the palefaces refined and intellectual. Each type had its virtues, and its faults. "At his highest level," Rahv said, "the paleface moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere; at his lowest he is genteel, snobbish and pedantic." Sound familiar? Rahv went on: "In giving expression to the vitality and to the aspirations of the people, the redskin is at his best; but at his worst he is a vulgar anti-intellectual, combining aggression with conformity and reverting to the crudest forms of frontier psychology." That may sound familiar too.
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Indeed, maybe it wasn’t even necessary to read the review to know this. Maybe all one really needed to know was that Paleface Wood writes his criticism out of Cambridge, Mass., and that Redskin Kirn writes his from — where else? —some place in Montana.