SOURCE: "California Gold," in New Republic, Vol. XLVIII, No. 619, October 13, 1926, p. 227.

In the following review, Maris provides some of the historical background for Cendrars's novel Sutter's Gold.

In Sutter's Gold Blaise Cendrars has once more turned to America, a literary field that has kindled his imagination many times before, and to what was perhaps the most thrilling, as certainly it was the most convulsive, period the New World has known—the discovery of gold in California in 1848. Blaise Cendrars, like Valéry Larbaud, Paul Morand and Jean Giraudoux, possesses a cosmopolitan outlook and has done not a little to fructify French culture by introducing France to some of her more and less remote neighbors. It is the more remote peoples that chiefly interest M. Cendrars. He is a world traveler and adventurer and is rarely observed in the haunts of Parisian writers, save when he reappears, like a...