IF Mr. V. F. Calverton's thesis is, as he claims that American literature has at last broken away from a slavish imitation for English models, he is in all likelihood right. If on the other hand it is what it actually seems, that the American writer has been liberated from the prejudices and snobberies of middle-class society, his proofs are sadly convincing.

Mr. Calverton is primarily a polemic and, like many of his kind, he stretches and overstates his facts to make his case more, plausible, thereby losing what over strength there may be in his argument. In "The Liberation of American Literature" he makes a rapid survey of literary endeavor in this country before the twentieth century, and with few exceptions brands it all as bourgeois and "un-American." It does not occur to him that, even if this, were true, the middle-class is after all sufficiently numerous to deserve literary expression, and the Unites States of the eighteenth and nineteenth countries was not "American," as he demands that term be used.

The author argues that literature should be judged sociologically rather than aesthetically. And on this basis he finds Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton Sinclair the greatest contemporary writers. But he does not take into consideration the fact that the sociological conditions which brought about a novel like "Oil," which he praises very highly, have passed; it's value sociologically speaking at any rate with likewise pass. Such circumstances are too transitory, too un-universal, too ratiocinative to form a basis for great literature.

The author writes with some case, but he uses certain words, such as "bourgeois" and "middle class" so often that the reader becomes weary, and begins to suspect that his exaggerated "class consciousness," for that is what it is, is perhaps a bitterness, the result of a personal frustration of some kind.

In the book there is no liberation for the evil, if such it be, of class literature. As permanent criticism the volume will last little longer than the sociological conditions it advocates for literary treatment.