A young novelist of the Middle West, Ben Hecht, has buried all the illusions of those young people into two novels which even Stendhal would not disown. In “Humpty-Dumpty” and in “Erik Dorn” realism is pushed to the point of melodrama, but we perceive behind the veil of cynicism a sadness and a moral confusion which are unmistakable. The spiritual bankruptcies described by Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson are idyls in comparison with the tableaux painted by Ben Hecht. “Humpty-Dumpty” is the tragedy of the void. The hero of the book is the catastrophic type of dual personality. He is a perverted simulator playing his life instead of living it, and playing it tragically, at the expense of others. A cruel sadist, he tortures people just when he likes them most. Humpty-Dumpty, a sinister puppet, is a moral, intellectual and social anarchist, as dangerous as a roaming tiger, a tiger doubled with a dilettante letting his soul (for he has a soul) wander among the flowers of decadent literature. “Erik Dorn” is not less cynical than “Humpty-Dumpty.” It is a challenge to society made by a nihilist. The hero of this novel goes straight before him in life as he would in the jungle. He believes in nothing, not even in himself. He is in love, and likes to make others suffer. The approaching war is but a pretext to rouse his dormant sadistic impulses. Erik Dorn is a Julien Sorel overlooked by the guillotine. The novel is the work of a man of great talent who shows himself to be--in the last chapters of the book, which describe the Communist Revolution in Bavaria--a real animator. Here is an example of Erik Dorn’s meditations: A tawdry pantomime was life, a pouring of blood, a grappling with shadows, a digging of graves. “Empty, empty,” his intelligence whispered in its depths, “a make-believe of lusts. What else? Nothing, nothing. Laws, ambitions, conventions--froth in an empty glass. Tragedies, comedies--all a swarm of nothings. Dreams in the hearts of men--thin fever outlines to which they clung in hope. Nothing ... nothing ...” Nitchevo! Vacuum! This Chicago Hamlet consoles himself by reading Huysmans, Rémy de Gourmont, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater. He goes in for literature without believing in it. It helps him to take life “against the grain.” “Living had made him forget life,” says Ben Hecht. Erik Dorn plunged into books to chloroform his passions: