[In the following review, the critic offers a negative appraisal of A Deal in Wheat.]

The author of The Octopus and The Pit would not, we think, have given to the stories which fill this volume [A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories] the honour of publication in book form. Yet, since he is no longer with us, we are inclined to consider the publication justifiable. The stories are a good way below the level of his best work, but they are characteristic, full of muscular force and energy. They are not original work, in the sense that the never completed trilogy on wheat was. The motif in one of them is really vieux jeu, we mean the story which ends with: "'The joke of it was,' finished Bunt, 'that they hadn't any blanket.'" In one or two others, which deal with seafaring adventure, we find an entire lack of originality, matter and manner being both so strongly derivative as to read almost as parody. The opening story, from which the book takes its title, is in the author's characteristic vein, and presents strongly his hatred of that soulless form of commerce in which dwellers in cities, who never see wheat, gamble in the world's food supplies, ruining producers and buyers alike in their mad thirst for speculative gains.