[Land des Frühlings (Land of Spring)] is a Traven source book: here we find, in the form of theory, argument, and statements of fact, Traven's principal ideas, as well as material similar to that which went into his novels and stories. Here we find Traven's fierce indignation, his anger at the inequities of a world he did not make, and his intense involvement in the fate of the underdog. Here we meet Traven the idealist and impatient philosophical anarchist, the observer of nature, the humorist, the lyrical and sentimental 19th-century Romantic, and the 20th-century ironist. And we get to know a side of the man that Traven deliberately distorts in his novels and denied vis-à-vis the biography hounds who came to Mexico to ferret out the secret of his identity: the educated, voracious, and critical reader, the intellectual whose roots go down deep into the soil...