BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

MIDSTREAM

... A hint from the first-year's recognition of a book that was made to remain in American literature:

Boston Transcript: If it be extravagance, let it be so, to say that Comfort's account of his childhood has seldom been rivaled in literature. It amounts to revelation. Really the only parallels that will suggest themselves in our letters are the great ones that occur in Huckleberry Finn.... This man Comfort's gamut is long and he has raced its full length. One wonders whether the interest, the skill, the general worth of it, the things it has to report of all life, as well as the one life, do not entitle Midstream to the very long life that is enjoyed only by the very best of books.

San Francisco Argonaut: Read the book. It is autobiography in its perfection. It shows more of the realities of the human being, more of god and devil in conflict, than any book of its kind.Springfield Republican: It is difficult to think of any other young American who has so courageously reversed the process of writing for the "market" and so flatly insisted upon being taken, if at all, on his own terms of life and art. And now comes his frank and amazing revelation, Midstream, in which he captures and carries the reader on to a story of regeneration. He has come far; the question is, how much farther will he go?

Mary Fanton Roberts in The Craftsman: Beside the stature of this book, the ordinary novel and biography are curiously dwarfed. You read it with a poignant interest and close it with wonder, reverence and gratitude. There is something strangely touching about words so candid, and a draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the inspiration of a quickened life.

Ida Gilbert Myers in Washington Star: Courage backs this revelation. The gift of self-searching animates it. Honesty sustains it. And Mr. Comfort's rare power to seize and deliver his vision inspires it. It is a tremendous thing—the greatest thing that this writer has yet done.

George Soule in The Little Review: Here is a man's life laid absolutely bare. A direct, big thing, so simple that almost no one has done it before—this Mr. Comfort has dared. People who are made uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything, to whom reserve is more important than truth—these will not read Midstream through, but others will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility of Mr. Comfort's frankness.

Edwin Markham in Hearst's Magazine: Will Levington Comfort, a novelist of distinction, has given us a book alive with human interest, with passionate sincerity, and with all the power of his despotism over words. He has been a wandering foot—familiar with many strands; he has known shame and sorrow and striving; he has won to serene heights. He tells it all without vaunt, relating his experience to the large meanings of life for all men, to the mystic currents behind life, out of which we come, to whose great deep we return.

12mo., Net, $1.25