Excerpt from Change the World!

This introduction has been started four times, being by turn whimsical, bubbling, ponderous and analytical, and it has ended in each case as a love letter for Mike Gold. There have been critics who have surveyed Mike's writings with thoroughness and, occasionally, with sense, and I suppose I have a duty in the matter but I suffer from a malady which makes me dislike people who dislike Mike and an inability to disassociate him from his work.

If I say that I wish to heaven I had written the essays in this book, I Say everything that an introduction could possibly say. Quite aside from my opinion of him as an individual, M. Gold happens to be an artist. I don't think you will find anything better than his Love Letter for France and I have for that piece of work and a dozen others in the book a feeling of envy which may not become me as a rival essayist but surely qualifies me as the writer of this preface.

Perhaps the most common indictment Of Mike is that he writes more with his heart than with his head, and I can never hear that brilliant commentary without looking steadfastly about for a fence paling with which to brain the critic. My grudges are apt to disappear with the com ing of dusk but I still treasure a feeling of pleasure over the passing Of Vanity Fair, which once nominated Mike for Oblivion on the ground that he shouted too loudly orwas too anguished or mannish or something. The notion of that particular period seemed to be that Sacco and Vanzetti were possibly innocent but why lift the voice. Mike has always lifted the voice and he has worn his heart on his sleeve and he has dared to feel deeply about im portant matters, which is still the sin cardinal in politer literary circles.

Perhaps the best example of Mike's essential rightness is his famous attack upon Thorton Wilder. Strictly speak ing Gold is no critic at all but the Wilder review was so vitriolically correct that it literally created a new school of writing and badly mangled the Old one. No decent critic would have written such a review. He would have ified and anded and butted it around until it resembled something by Mr. Ernest Boyd and would have had exactly as much weight as a literary pronouncement in the Christian Science Monitor. There will be theses written in years to come proving, and perhaps rightly, that Mike went too far. That will never alter the fact that when Mike penned that particular bit of dynamite it was so perfect that it took on the aspect of a message from above.

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