I say this because I have lived and known the life he has pictured so well in this Book; I spent my late youth in these shaded oak lands where so many of his scenes are so pictorially laid, and he has made me live over again the scenes of my freshman manhood. No writer since the days of Remington can give you such a word picture of the west. That’s because he is a westerner himself, and has only an eye for the beautiful things as he and nature alone can describe them. He alone of all our modern writers knows the people of which they write. When he describes a Corset you can feel it pinch. If it’s a Sunrise he describes, you reach for an Umbrella. His jugglery of correct words and perfect English sentences is magical, and his spelling is almost uncanny. The words, _Illiterate Digest_, which appear upon the title page of this book, has been generally compared to Don Quixote and to the Pickwick Papers, while E. M. Vogue places its author somewhere between Cervantes and LeSage. However, considerable the influence of Cervantes and Dickens may have been, the first in the matter of structure, the other in background, humor, and detail of characterization, the predominating and distinguishing quality of this Author’s work is undeniably foreign to both and quite peculiar to itself. Something that for want of a better term might be called the quality of American Soul, any reader familiar as I know you all to be with the works of Dostoieffsky, Turgenev, or even Tolstoi, will grasp the deeper meaning of a work like this. Some consider the Author a realist, who has drawn with meticulous detail a picture of contemporary life, others more observing see in him a great symbolist. He always remembers that it is dangerous to jest with laughter. This man in writing this has done a service to all thinking mankind. It is a revelation, as an omen of a freer future. Belinsky, the great Russian Critic to whom Mr. Rogers had read the manuscript, said “it looked like another Ben Hur to him.” So now Mr. Cobb, and Mr. Lardner, and all you introduction writers, what do I want with you? There is not a one of you could have said the things of me that I have said, because you Guys dont know what books to look in to get all that big league stuff out of, Yours for Arts sake, WILLIAM PENN ADAIR ROGERS (_boy that is my real name, let some Literary Guy top that_) P. S. I got enough Introduction left over to write another Introduction if I had anything to write another book about. BREAKING INTO THE WRITING GAME [Illustration: YOU ARE GOING TO GET THE LOW-DOWN ON SOME OF THOSE BIRDS WHO ARE SENDING HOME THE RADISH-SEED.] BREAKING INTO THE WRITING GAME