SOURCE: "Gusto vs. Art," in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. VIII, No. 13, October 17, 1931, p. 201.

Canby was an American editor, educator, biographer, and literary critic. In the following review, he contends that while. American Beauty is well-constructed and realistic in its surface details, it lacks the subtlety and depth of a great novel.

The Poles came in. They tore up the brush-grown fields of old Connecticut and forced new yield from them. They settled in those loveliest of American landscapes and, utterly oblivious of their dim beauty, saw them only as land, unused land, cheap land. They brought a peasantry on a soil that had never known a peasantry before, clucked heartily to hearty women and beat them when they needed it, gawked at the faded New Englanders who first hired and then sold to them, grasped drunkenly at the new vulgarisms of the towns, and in the...