[Burnett was an American critic, journalist, and editor. In the following review of We Are the Living, he greatly admires Caldwell's ability to "push through to the core of feeling" in the stories in the collection.]

Erskine Caldwell spends his winters in Georgia and his summers in Maine. Since he, of all the younger American short story writers, is one of the most naturally steeped in the special American qualities of his background, We Are the Living should interest not only followers of his artistic word, but also observers of the native mores.

Caldwell was not one of the American younger generation who went to Paris; when some of the rest of us were picking up a little French and less German, Caldwell was down among the cotton pickers or up among the people in the backwoods of Maine. His stories have the native smell of both spots. We Are the Living is a rich book, full of honesty, humor and feeling; picturesque, at times even burlesque; an authentic contribution to the best of modern-day American writing.

There are twenty stories in this collection, ranging from the lyrical young-love story "Warm River" to the New England levity of a frightened tight-lipped Maine family whose neighborhood is suddenly over-run with foreigners, "Country Full of Swedes." The bulk of the stories, fifteen of them, are stories of crucial, often poignant, sometimes comic, revelation, all of them involved with the sex impulse. Indeed, We Are the living might well be We Are the loving. With these characters, living is loving. The god of life is a goddess, Venus. Venus in a cottonfield, naked beneath her skimpy cotton dress; a tantalizing fifteen-year-old girl bride of a lazy Georgia farmer; a young wench who wants to get a husband and succeeds in snaring the traveling India Root Tonic professor; the tortured and defiant young girl who left her country home to be a city stenographer and comes home a harlot.

In America there was a time when writers hesitated to be forthright sensualists. Those days have gone. Caldwell may be the great American sensualist. He is in the tradition of Gautier and Dreiser; conversion to beauty, even to conscience, lies in the observed or remembered beauty of a shapely bosom. His treatment of sensuality is direct and open; his Venuses have breasts and thighs and healthy bodies; and in his best passages, sense and sensitivity spin out into lyrics.

Caldwell is a person with more than one string to his lyre. He evokes the cantankerous old codgers of New England better than a Down East fiddler. They harp and whine and display their cussedness in several stories which may well go into the language as classics of their kind: "Grass Fire," for instance, in which two cussed old neighbors, ornery as hound-dogs, almost burn themselves up rather than lend or take a helping hand, or good advice. "A Woman in the House" and "Over the Green Mountains" are stories of Venus in the North. And Venus shows her transmutations. Her transit to New England has warped the lady: her devotees are not at all the direct-actionists of love one finds in the stories of the South.

In the South, Caldwell's Venus is a lusty lass, who stands readily and willingly revealed beneath "shirtwaists" and under the one-piece garb of fifteen-year-old girls. His girls display themselves with the age-old art of the dancing girls of the East. And when they show themselves, in a cotton field, or on the top step of a front porch, their men become very living, very loving animals.

When Venus goes North with Mr. Caldwell, things are different. Her admirers burn but they do not marry, until, at least, they have the perverted additional satisfaction of, in so doing, getting the better of somebody.

Some of the best stories in the book are lyrics of childhood, with young awakening characters like the boy in "Indian Summer" . . . , who is halted and made aware of the difference in a girl at the moment he and his chum are vengefully plastering her body with river mud; the poor girl in "Rachel" who dies of poisoning from cast-off food; the girl on the operating table in a rented-room in one of the most directly treated stories of that sort yet written in this country.

The volume has a curious unity, in spite of its range from North to South. The life in the title is the sex of these people, simple and direct with the simple and direct, and tortured into strange and fragile shapes with the more complex. The ability to push through to the core of feeling is amply demonstrated in the best of the stories in the volume, and feeling at its best, in "Crown Fire" and "The Empty Room," has transcended itself into poetry.