Robert Emmett Cantwell, novelist, journalist, short-story writer, historian, and biographer, is best known as the author of two novels highly praised in the 1930s. His first novel, Laugh and Lie Down (1931), described as a work of social protest, won him a reputation as a member of the anti-Fascist literary establishment of his time. It was followed by The Land of Plenty, published in 1934. Born in Little Falls (now Vader), Washington, Cantwell attended the University of Washington for one year before dropping out of school to begin his career as a writer. F. Scott Fitzgerald spotted an early Cantwell short story and wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that "in The New American Caravan, amid much sandwiching of Joyce & Co. is the work of a 21-year-old named Robert Cantwell. Mark it well, for my guess is that he's learned a better lesson from Proust than Thornton Wilder did and...