AND so there I was, an American rapidly approaching middle life, sitting in my room over in west Twenty-second Street at night after a day spent listening to the talk of the new men and trying with all my might to be one of the new men myself. Below me in the street the common life of people went on but I tried to put it away from me for the time, was having too good a time thinking of myself to think much of ordinary people. It is a mood that has appeared and reappeared in me at various times and I am trying to clear it out of my system by writing this book. When I have done that I hope to shut up on the subject for keeps. In my book I have had something to say of my father, emphasizing the showman side of his nature. I have perhaps lied now and then regarding the facts of his life but have not lied about the essence of it. He was a man who loved a parade, bands playing in streets and himself in a gaudy uniform somewhere up near the head of the procession and I have myself had a pretty hard time not making a parade out of my own life. Some time after the period of which I am now writing, my friend Mr. Paul Rosenfeld was with me in London stopping at the same hotel and one day I got away from him and when he wasn’t watching wandered into a gents’ furnishing store. When he came into the hotel later I took him to my room and displayed before him the things I had bought. He almost wept but there was little he could do. “Don’t,” he said. “Come out of the room. Promise me you won’t wear these things until you get out again to Chicago.” I was in New York and was the son of my father. The New Movement in the Arts was under way. If it was going to be a parade I wanted, ached, to be in it. Was I but trying to put myself over to the literary world as formerly I had been employed to put over automobile tires to the public? It was a question I was compelled to keep asking myself as it had something to do with the ineffectualness of my own hands lying before me on the window sill. I kept thinking of middle-western men like Dreiser, Masters, Sandburg and the others. There was something sincere and fine about them. Perhaps they had not worried, as I seemed to be doing, about the whole question of whether they belonged to the New Movement or not. I thought of them as somewhere out in the Middle West quietly at work, trying to understand the life about them, trying to express it in their work as best they could. How many other men were there in towns and cities of that great middle-western empire--my own land--younger men coming along. I had been unable to make my own beginning until most of the stronger years of my own life had passed. Perhaps I could not have begun at all but for them and perhaps, because of them, other men could now begin ten years younger than myself.