SOURCE: "Italy and England Appear in New Fiction," in The New York Herald Tribune Books, May 21, 1939, p. 6.

A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955) and Contemporaries (1962), and particularly for On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American prose writing since the era of William Dean Howells. In the following review of The Medals, and Other Stories, he finds the stories for the most part tiresome.

Luigi Pirandello spent the first half of his life looking at Italians from a classroom, and the last half giggling at them from Olympian heights. Olympus is not in the Fascist atlas; and that was his good fortune. By identifying all men as freaks, he was saved from feeling for them as citizens of Italy. But this appearance of remoteness, of finding all systems equally vain and damnable in the sight of eternity, was...