tracks and conceived a passion for thoroughbred horses. Then he knocked around a bit on farms, in mines, in factories, in paint shops, drug stores and harness shops, working at one thing and another. But he is distinctly from Chicago, too, from the Chicago of Mr. Darrow and Mr. Masters and Mr. Sandburg and Margaret Anderson, from roaring, odorous, fuliginous Chicago, where poets are obliged to yell if they are to be heard above the booming of big business, the bellowing of the stockyards, and the bass drums of advertising conventions. Also he is from New York, where intellectual Villagers draw a little away from Wall Street to discuss anarchy and perfect love over synthetic gin and spaghetti. But finally he is from the left bank of the Seine, where one can sit all day on the boulevard talking of line and color and the virtues of words, with enthusiastic foreigners of American birth who regard George Moore, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein as the brightest constellation in heaven. Yes, he is from the fat Midlands, but decidedly he has been a passionate pilgrim.
I wish to write an introduction to the works of Mr. Anderson for the benefit of correspondents who inquire: "When will the country begin to sicken of this flood of literary rot from the corn and hog belt?" But the devil—to borrow his own favorite literary expletive, he doesn't make it easy for me!
Recently he has been down the Mississippi Valley, down the river, living in New Orleans, I believe. He has been getting the "feel" of all that rich, crude, rough, profane tract of land and water which Huckleberry Finn traversed and navigated in his ingenuous youth. He has been down in the heart of our trans-
