Silence and pale dawn, and empty emptiness. Ah, the last silence and the last heart-ache, and the last nickel, and the last green pickle lying on the last cold plate on the last free-lunch counter in the world! How sad it all is! [Yes, how sad it all is that some minds have to jeer everything in the world, from Helen’s beauty to Bernhardt’s “wooden leg.”—_jh._] The Iliad of America _Daphne Carr, Columbia, Missouri_: The first number of _Blast_ had among its veins of gold ore and volcanic deposit a certain precious spot: “American Art When It Appears Will be Immense.” That is the way I feel about Sherwood Anderson’s Art as revealed in his first novel, _Windy McPherson’s Son_. Here is the beginning of our story telling art, primitive, to be sure, coarse, but a-quiver with that life whose pulsing reality we are forever eager to touch, to know. Sherwood’s hero is the typically primitive hero—a brother to Aggamemnon and Charlemagne, the born leader, the maker of destinies. But Sam McPherson’s background is not the helmet plumes of the knights or the nodding heads of the Council of Elders. He is of our time, of our own middle West, with our well-known background of nodding corn tassels and steer-fattening farmers, with our stinking, deafening Chicago for a battleground. For he fights, furiously, and, like Achilles, for the love of fighting, but not, like Achilles, with the lives of men, but with their potential lives—foodstuffs—with their time, and their peace of mind, their happiness, their everything—summed up in money. And, for the love of the fight he wins. And then, because he is a white American with twenty centuries of Christianity behind him and not a pagan Aggamemnon to be satisfied with the mere winning, he turns aside from his victory and goes seeking an ideal. So there is our hero, the forever worshiped König-man. But Sam McPherson is not the glorious part of the book, or the reason that our grandchildren, and probably our great-great grandchildren will still keep _Windy McPherson’s Son_ as living words. Sherwood Anderson has dredged up from the mud of our prairies the same apalling rhythm of life that Æschylus found in the stone of the Acropolis. And even as Aeschylus built his rhythm in cedar-wood and overlaid it with ivory and gold and polished marble and carved it and set it with jewels balancing his ornaments to the nicety of a hair, and so finished his symphony to please the blue and white spirit of Hellas, so Sherwood Anderson has taken his discovery, re-built its same rhythmic proportions and scooping up grey gravel and sand and concrete rocks from his own prairie has built his symphony. Will we see the wonder of its form in spite of its grey surface? Can we feel the force, the genuineness of Sherwood’s discovery? Can we see the bareness of American reality and yet shut our eyes to that reality? “Oh, then this Anderson is a realist”, you say. “We’re getting tired of them.”