scornful flight from the familiar path. And now, not to enter into detail which may be found most captivatingly set forth in "A Story Teller's Story," after only ten years in letters he finds himself in the front line of the "new literary movement" in America and, in certain respects of his craft, one of the most interesting men writing English. For him, at least, what happened within him at forty was epoch-making. Relatively speaking, nothing that happened before mattered till the "illumination" of his middle years broke over it.
I should like to see Sherwood Anderson "whole" and in relation to this literary movement in which he is now active. Rigorous teachers seized my youth and taught me some phrases about the desirability of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole. But experience has taught me that it is exceedingly difficult to see steadily and whole any object which is alive and moving rapidly. Our object is very much alive and is moving rapidly. I mean by our object that group of American writers which is most conspicuously engaged in the "advance of letters."
Some of them affectionately salute. Theodore Dreiser as their shaggy spiritual Father, as the path-breaker who went before them and with heavy stumbling tread opened the way to Truth and Life. Some trace their descent from Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Some neither know nor inquire who their spiritual Grandfather was. But all of them, with increasing clearness as to what they are about, are seeking, in divers ways, to end the dwindling reign of "the New Englanders" over the American conscience and the American imagination. They seek to pull out all the unused stops in the organ of national consciousness. They
