The Frenchman or Continental is quite prepared to understand that sort of literature. The United States have not had the monopoly of moral anarchy since the war. The same wave of emancipation and revolt which brought up in France the works of Radiguet, Roger Martin du Gard, Morand, Lacretelle, Schlumberger, Lucien Fabre and others, has given to America its McAlmons, its Ben Hechts, its Floyd Dells, its Waldo Franks. The young American is a natural-born rebel. He has always been that, or at least since Mark Twain wrote “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn.” How could he help it? What adolescence is freer than his? Where in the world could there be fonder parents and less tyrannical teachers? Is not the American coming of age from the very time of his early youth? Is not playing hookey his favorite diversion? See with what zest he goes in for sports, with what joy he plays the umpire. And the automobile, and jazz, or giving the lie to prohibition, and the thousand and one diversions and eccentricities with which he enlivens his existence? America is so vast, the call-of-the-wild so forceful! Numerous advanced American novelists have made themselves the interpreters of suppressed youth. There has been great growth in the “novel of adolescence” in America, as well as in France, in the last ten years. I shall review in this chapter some of the more significant ones. I begin with the novels of Robert McAlmon. Mr. McAlmon is only thirty years old. He was born in Kansas, the ninth child of an itinerant pastor. He earned his living around the ranches and as a tramp and professional hobo, cowboy, reporter, press agent, lumberjack, model in New York studios, all of which did not prevent him from completing his studies in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. In 1918 he promoted an aviation magazine. Later, in Paris, he founded with William Carlos Williams, “Contact,” a printing firm, to which we owe the publication (in France, Oh, Land of Liberty!) of some of the most daring and original works of the young American school. Mr. McAlmon is the author of several volumes of poems and short stories. He is also the author of a novel called “Village.” This village is named Wentworth. It recalls Sinclair Lewis’ Gopher Prairie and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg. There is the same isolation, the same type of shut-in lives, the identical tragic attempts at evasion and identical suppression. Here is the panorama of Wentworth. It tells a lot as to the nostalgia of its inhabitants: