The writings of the immigrants have hitherto been largely historical and sociological in character. Miss Yezierska’s work suggests the unlimited artistic possibilities of the newer elements in our national life,--gifts on which we should not lay violent hands, but which we should carefully conserve as a part of the heritage of America to the future. It is interesting to note that one of her stories was selected by Edward J. O’Brien as the best piece of imaginative writing in short form produced during the year 1919. That part of the story that follows is taken from the issue of _The Century_ for November, 1920. The same story in longer and somewhat different form is found in a volume of her collected writings recently published by Houghton Mifflin under the title, “Hungry Hearts.” HOW I FOUND AMERICA Times changed. The sweat-shop conditions that I had lived through had become a relic of the past. Wages had doubled, tripled, and went up higher and higher, and the working day became shorter and shorter. I began to earn enough to move my family uptown into a sunny, airy flat with electricity and telephone service. I even saved up enough to buy a phonograph and a piano. My knotted nerves relaxed. At last I had become free from the worry for bread and rent, but I was not happy. A more restless discontent than ever before ate out my heart. Freedom from stomach needs only intensified the needs of my soul. I ached and clamored for America. Higher wages and shorter hours of work, mere physical comfort, were not yet America. I had dreamed that America was a place where the heart could grow big with living. Though outwardly I had become prosperous, life still forced me into an existence of mere getting and getting. _Ach!_ how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the Bronx, the uptown ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving. The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once brought them to America. More and more the all-consuming need for a friend possessed me. In the street, in the cars, in the subways, I was always seeking, ceaselessly seeking for eyes, a face, the flash of a smile that would be light in my darkness. I felt sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a shadow, an echo, a wild dream, but I couldn’t help it. Nothing was real to me but my hope of finding a friend. America was not America to me unless I could find an American that would make America real.