Mr. Edward Dahlberg's Can These Bones Live is an American classic, even if only a few people know it; but what kind of classic, it is difficult to say. Criticism as we write it at present has no place for it, and this means that I shall probably not be able to do justice to my own admiration. Mr. Dahlberg, like Thoreau whom he admires more than any other nineteenth-century American, eludes his contemporaries; he may have to wait for understanding until the historians of ideas of the next generation can place him historically. For we have at present neither literary nor historical standards which can guide us into Mr. Dahlberg's books written since Bottom Dogs, which was published more than thirty years ago. It is significant that he has repudiated this early, naturalistic novel, in spite of the considerable admiration that it won and still retains among...