[An American novelist, editor, nonfiction writer, autobiographer, and author of children's books, La Farge won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel Laughing Boy. Also the winner of the 1931 O. Henry Memorial Prize, La Farge has frequently written about Native Americans and has served as president of the National Association on Indian Affairs and the Association on American Indian Affairs. In the review of Sundown below, he praises Mathews's realistic and sensitive portrayal of Native Americans.]

Mr. Mathews, himself part Osage and reared on the Osage Reservation, gave good evidence in Wah 'Kon-Tah that he could do that rare thing, write about Indians from the inside, and furthermore could make an interesting book of it with real literary value. One waited to see how he would follow up his first successful venture. In the present book [Sundown] he has taken up about where the other left off, a novel of the young Indian with some white blood, fundamentally Osage, bewildered by false values and caught in the devastating flood of gold which swept that mighty nation into the gutter.

But this is no mere historical study in novel form, nor just a literate protest against the foul conquest of a primitive civilization by an advanced barbarism; it is a full, rounded novel in its own right, reflective, at moments beautiful, at moments a little sloppy, carrying the reader with steady interest along its hero's story. In fact, I may do an injustice to Sundown by beginning with a statement of Indian themes and problems. The first consideration is that here is a well-written, well-planned, sensitive study of a young man. As such it stands on its own feet. Secondly, the young man is an Osage with one eighth of white blood (as near as I can calculate it) and too much white background for his own good, yet not enough to be useful to him—in this, typical of many. Such a novel, concerned with such a man, must then of necessity be also an unusual study of Indians in contact with whites. Since the writer is skilful, observant, and knows his material well, it is also an excellent literary document on Oklahoma, something to be taken, and enjoyed, as a little salt on Miss Ferber's too gorgeous Cimarron.

In a few spots, Mr. Mathews's grammar goes to pieces in a manner which suggests that the trouble may be bad proof-reading. He makes a good deal of the break-up of the Reservation and mentions various differences of opinion concerning allotment and oil leases, without giving the reader much, if any idea of what these signify, nor of what effects they produce. To one unfamiliar with the Osage's story, this should be extra confusing. I have some acquaintance with it in an academic way and found that part of the book somewhat so. One feels also, that the case has been possibly overstated when not a single attractive, or even reasonably decent, white American crosses the pages of the book.

Regardless of these faults, it is a relief to read a "sectional" novel of full realism, depicting oil towns, reservations, the state University, training camps, and so much else with remorseless conviction while giving one no sense of mere dirt-piling or of that fear of beauty which frustrates so many so-called realistic writers.

Most Americans do not realize in what a large part of this country Indians and whites are intermingled, nor have they any idea of the amazing, often grotesque effects of this contact on daily life, on politics, on morals and thought in every form. When thinking of Indians at all, we tend to visualize the old-time, independent hostiles, or the relatively remote and untouched tribes of the Southwest in whose stories, even today, but a few white men would appear. Mr. Mathews has turned to those others whose lives are twined in with cities and whole states, and in so doing has tapped for the first time a rich vein in the resources of our literature.