Like Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson is a product of the Middle West. He was born in Camden, Ohio, in 1872. He also is an offspring of the prairie. Taine has long been dead and his theory of _la race, le milieu, le moment_ is to-day as dead as he. And yet, there is a great temptation to revive it to help us link Anderson’s primitivism to his environment. In fact, Anderson saved us that trouble recently when he published “Tar,” an autobiography redolent with the smack of the crude land where corn, cattle and people grow together, in torrid atmosphere, over the huge plains swept by torrents of heat and light. The boy in “Tar” was not made out of the common clay, but of the tepid dark loam on the shores of the giant Mississippi. Only amidst the Russian steppes, or in the valleys of the Ganges, could we find to-day as crude and primitive a setting for a writer. In this respect “Tar” strikes an almost savage note. One would wonder how such wild phases of life could appear in a modern country like the United States, if one ignored the fact that geography has not kept pace with history in the growth of America. The land is still, in many parts, as crude as it was in the days of the Indian. The primitivism of Anderson and Whitman is still written in the expanse of their country, a country as large and as wild to-day, here and there, as the African jungle. The real wonder is not the resemblance between the American people and their surroundings, but the fact that art of any sort can grow in such primitive parts.