SOURCE: "Four Great Novels," in In My Opinion: An Inquiry into the Contemporary Novel, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1952, pp. 235-48.

In the following excerpt, Prescott praises the philosophical seriousness and the stylistic accessibility of The Root and the Flower.

[L. H. Myers' The Root and the Flower] is a novel of contemplation instead of action, a philosophical novel instead of an historical one. Its nobility lies in the ethical doctrine which is its conclusion and in the idealism of the quest for that doctrine which runs through all of the long work.

The Root and the Flower is an omnibus volume which contains four separate novels. The first three, The Near and the Far, Prince Jali and Rajah Amar, were first published in the 1930s. The fourth, The Pool of Vishnu, was published in 1940. All four appeared together for the first time in 1947 after the death of their...