The author has selected a fragment from the history of the beginnings of America and has made of it a ground upon which he creates an edifice compounded of the sufferings, victories and defeats of those early pioneers in the first days of industrialism in our country. This novel is the richly human story of a lone giant of the earth, George Rood, who wages a single-handed fight against a glass manufacturing enterprise which springs up across the road from his farm upon the discovery of natural gas in the vicinity.

George Rood loses his wife in childbirth at the time of an explosion caused by the tapping of a gas well almost at his front gate. Embittered by this sad experience and alien to the despoiling methods of the new enterprise, he raises his son as a true child of the soil, mothered only by Mamie, a young servant girl, and Aunt Fanny, a woman already well on in years. "The man and this hebetic image of himself walked the straight ways" refusing to become wealthy by selling the farm as the Karchers had done, in cause of the industrial venture. Early in the book we have a premonition that little Georgie will follow, tragically, in his father's footsteps when we read Aunt Fanny's words, "He's jest the spit of you, George. He's jest like you was starting all over to be my little one". And George Rood repeated "Jest like me starting over again."

His sudden love for Mamie, by whom he has another son, but whom he loses to the dissolute Jake Karcher, and the mocking success of the hated "hell-hole," incites him to a deeper love for farm and Georgie. There is a pathetic truthfulness in the father's struggle and efforts to keep his son's attitude like his own when he early realizes that the little fellow is not entirely out of sympathy with the glass industry. He tries to pass this off and the simple defense mechanism in his words "You and me is farmers nothing else" is strikingly touching. The now grown son, like father, ironically enough, loses the woman he loves to his half brother, and the elder Rood who pays doubly for his sin when Georgie becomes a prominent engineer in a glass works in another city, spends the sunset of his life with Mamie, after Jake Karcher meets his death at the hands of his wife's son.

Howard Stephenson calls upon his vast knowledge of provincial country folk and factory workers, gathered while living in small towns in Ohio and Indiana where he became acquainted with glass-blowers and learned of the gaudy boom days in that region, days which belonged to the generation just previous. His particular quality is an ability to secure and hold a dramatic movement through the medium of his delightfully informal style and this together with the fineness of the use of dialogue, makes of his characters living people. He extracts the essentials of episodes and scenes, and delicacy, charm, brutality and courseness come alike in the pictures written out by the author. This is one of the finest novels of the new year. It expresses, like none other, the loamy, heartfelt, antagonism of those simple people who believed the new industrial era was an infringement upon their honest lives and labors.