[In the review below, Kaufman provides a highly favorable assessment of Sundown.]

No figure in the American scene is more inherently tragic than that of the young Indian who realizes fully the loss of his fathers' material and spiritual heritage, but who is unable to adjust himself to white civilization. Such a one is Chal Windzer [of Sundown], son of a mixed blood Osage father and of a full blood Osage mother, born about the turn of the century, when the Osages, Chal's father among them, were eagerly looking forward to the exploitation of their reservation in northern Oklahoma. He is molded by his heroic, tender, loyal mother and the old warriors into a typical little Indian boy.

But civilization comes to the Osage; first the cattle men, then the oil boom, with its attending demoralization. And his father's influence is at work. Chal wants to be a white man, but he does not know how. At his state university he is welcomed by the glad handers because of his handsome physique and his wealth; he feels the insincerity, the emptiness back of much college life, but he has no refuge from it except lonely walks on the prairie.

The outbreak of the war is a relief. He understands the function of war; his people were warriors. Flying appeals to him; many Osages are named "Eagle." What he does not understand is the pettiness of discipline, the fuss and the fuming, the blatant sophistication which passes for progressiveness. He meets many types of American men and women; and he appraises them without malice, but unsparingly. Yet he realizes that the day of the old Indian life is over. Sometimes he even laughs at the old ways. In the end he goes back to the reservation, to the desolation of stagnation, to the artificial stimulus of drinking.

Mr. Mathews writes with complete objectivity; he is a superb realist. Not until near the close of the book does the reader realize that it is a merciless and inescapable indictment of our civilization, which has destroyed 'something sublime and beautiful, not only without providing a substitute for it, but without even knowing that it existed. Yet there is no pleading; even in his decay young Chal keeps something of that Indian mysticism which gives him a feeling of oneness with his environment.

Mr. Mathews is part Osage; one of his ancestors, Hard Robe, led General Custer's scouts at the Battle of Washita, and another was "Old Bill" Williams, mountain man and compadre of Kit Carson. He is not only an Indian, but a cultured white man, a graduate of Oxford. He has gone deeper into Indian consciousness and set down his findings more tellingly than any other writer of fiction known to me. Moreover, he is an artist with words.