+ Booklist 17:117 D ’20
“The book is too long, rather tedious. But it has a humanity, a popular note which will appeal to thousands.” S. M. R.
+ − Bookm 52:372 D ’20 100w
“The total impression one derives is that neither Jane Austen nor George Eliot depicted the provincial England of the past with more vividness than that with which Mr Lewis portrays the present-day American small town.” S. A. Coblentz
+ Bookm 52:357 Ja ’21 800w
“He knows the American small town for what it is, history in that respect being the supreme achievement in American fiction. But when he creates a protest against it, an attack upon its vicious existence, through the symbol of Carol Kennicott he comes nearer to the function of a treatise than the process of art. Kennicott is masterly drawn.” W: S. Braithwaite
+ − Boston Transcript p4 D 11 ’20 1700w
“The atmosphere of the sordid smug little burg is well done.”
+ Cleveland p105 D ’20 40w + Dial 70:106 Ja ’21 80w
“At times, Mr Lewis makes one feel that he has treated his people as mere incidents in an environment, that he has pictured them, not without malice, like Dickensian gargoyles. But there are scenes in his book as sensitively felt as some in Mr Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Winesburg, Ohio.’ These exceptional passages of his book are an earnest of the restraint and mastery which one will have the right to expect of his later work.” H. J. Seligmann