[An Autobiographical Novel by Kenneth Rexroth is a] detailed account of his first twenty-one years by a man who appears to have total recall of almost everything that has happened to him. It is easy to see why Kenneth Rexroth was regarded almost with reverence by a whole generation of West Coast poets, for he had exemplified in his youth their idea that all life is movement and that all movement should be free….

An Autobiographical Novel is a wonderfully entertaining book. It is also a specifically American odyssey, which has no counterpart in any English life of the period.

The figure who emerged from [a] stewpot of emotional and cultural self-education … [was] very Amerìcan: a tough-minded man strongly sceptical about accepted ideas and attitudes, an idealistic anarchist prepared to place personal freedom far above the idea of order, a believer in art as the noblest form...