In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

One must approach the stories of this storyteller in the spirit of reverence, in the spirit of mystery-as one approaches the child. Let the critical come after. If one begins by analyzing Sherwood Anderson, one will not receive him; and all one's analysis will go for naught. Let him lodge in us ungrudgingly; not till then let our intellectual questionings have play.

For his tales are a testimony; and they testify to the still infantile revelation of Our America. What would have happened in Europe, if the naïve confessionals of convert Gaul and Frank and Goth had been analyzed before they were accepted? Anderson's books are a relation of the search for fresh religious values; a groping toward an Apocalypse in our own inchoate terms. Woe to us if we do not nurture this act in the childlike simplicity of the man who gives it!