John Gardner's career was permanently changed by his publication of On Moral Fiction (1978), a controversial and derided assessment of the state of literature as Gardner saw it. By arguing for a return to greater seriousness and moral commitments in literature, Gardner found himself attacked on all sides by critics and writers who found his conservatism suspicious or simply irrelevant. In this short tribute to Gardner's late intellectual concerns, Phil Jourdan looks at some of the difficulties in On Moral Fiction, and asks whether Gardner was rigorous enough in his deployment of various...