SOURCE: “Pseudo-Historical Fiction,” in The Nation, Vol. 129, No. 3349, September 11, 1929, p. 276.

In the following mixed review of The Rebels, Fadiman deems the novel “a study of the conspiratorial temperament.”

One of the reasons for Alfred Neumann's failure to gain an American audience commensurate with his merits is that he is touted as an historical novelist when he is not one at all. By turns he is mystery-story writer and metaphysician, a sorcerer whose effects vary from the awe-inspiring to the parlor-tricky. To read his works as historical novels is simply confusing. He is never really interested in creating a background or making vivid some historical complex. The treatment in The Rebels of the Carbonari uprising in central Italy from 1820 to 1830 is purposely oblique and fragmentary. Actually, the reader is not supposed to know what it is all about, to have any systematic understanding of the social and economic forces...