SOURCE: "Show Boat Is High Romance," in The New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1926, p. 5.

Kronenberger was an American essayist, biographer, novelist, and educator. In the following favorable review of Show Boat, a portion of which was excerpted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 18, he describes the novel as "little else but an irresistible story," largely due to its self-consciously romantic and nostalgic tone at a time when most "serious" literature strove for realism.

We need not be sentimentalists to regard the past with a romantic eye. It is the normal way of regarding it. The past is, at first hand, romantic. Disenchantment comes only when we reconstruct it laboriously with the aid of history books and contemporary documents, or when we treat it in terms of the present. Flaubert pored for many years over source-material, and Salammbo is not romantic. John Erskine brought Helen up to date, and...