SOURCE: “Escape to the West,” in Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XIX, No. 21, March 18, 1939, p. 6.

In the following review, DeVoto finds Bitter Creek to be a highly enjoyable work but overly dependent on the conventions of the historical novel.

James Boyd's novels are among the best of our time in America and they are by so far the best historical novels that no others seriously challenge their preëminence. From Drums to Roll River, however, they have had a common characteristic that in varying degree moderates one's critical enthusiasm. As a form the historical novel has been depressingly subject to conventions; it has tended to deal in stock types, stock characters, stock situations, stock emotions, stock rhetoric. Part of Mr. Boyd's service to his art has been his splendid destruction of these clichés. He has sliced away convention in great hunks and has so altered the genre...