Waters, Frank - Margaret Wallace (review date 9 February 1941)
Margaret Wallace (review date 9 February 1941)
SOURCE: "Early New Mexico," in The New York Times, February 9, 1941, pp. 6-7.
[In the following, Wallace provides a favorable assessment of People of the Valley.]
People of the Valley is not a novel for every one. One can scarcely imagine its rocketing into the best-seller class, and probably it would not, without a great deal of expert tinkering by script writers, make a very good moving picture. It has a certain familiar Steinbeck quality—earthy, ribald, honest, sharply observed and profoundly human. But where [John] Steinbeck likes to draw from his observation a sociological lesson, fairly specific and easily ingested, Frank Waters concerns himself with values of an altogether different order, with fundamental moral values at once as simple and as incomprehensible as faith itself.
Accordingly he demands rather more from his reader than Mr. Steinbeck. In spite of this, or...
[The entire page is 810 words long]
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