"Moon-Calf" is a book so unusual in the annals of our literature that it should be read at once by everyone interested in American life and in literature as a fine art. It is the biography of a young near rebel of the middle west, who develops in the extraordinarily inarticulate environment of a small Illinois town, but it is more. Floyd Dell shows here the grim and arid subsistence which the small town has to offer to the young man of talent which America herself has to offer to the young man of talent, though the author may not have meant anything so sweeping. With all this, "Moon-Calf" is a novel which, once started, it is impossible to put down, written in the "light and laughing" prose to which the author refers, and with a delicate and distinguished craftsmanship. Of particular interest to physicians is the fact that this book is, in a sense, a product of psychoanalysis. Many writers enunciate truths about the hidden places in the human soul of whose implications they are only half aware -- a manner of revelation. Mr. Dell is entirely articulate on that score. He does not talk about complexes, but he interprets the events of his hero's life from childhood on with a deft and sure analysis that is truly illuminating. One might almost say that this book could not have been written If Mr. Dell had not been aware of how Felix Fay's fear of living influenced his every action. And he shows the origin of this fear in the childhood of Felix, a dreamy, bookish, fragile child among a group of hoydenish brothers and sisters and schoolmates, a child who compensated for his manifest Physical inferiority and his helplessness by a continuous life of fantasy. Felix's great effort, like that of all such young persons, is to translate himself into a living human being. It is not entirely Felix's fault, of course, that he grew up on dreams instead of realities. Partly his flight was due to the fact that he was so fearfully isolated. There weren't any others like him. There was no appreciable intellectual life in Maple and Vickley, nothing to feed his imagination but the incredibly bare existence of a poor middleclass family in a small middle western town. If he took to books and dreams, it was because there was nothing else to take to. The one exception of his younger days is the episode of Rose Henderson, with its brief and poignant loveliness. One cannot say that Felix was the victim of Puritanism as much as of sheer emptiness. His home was the library, where he read a jumble of everything under the sun, but it was a scattered. ungu'ded reading. School brought him nothing in the way of intellectual stimulus. And this solitary, secluded, in growing life of his in books made him a personality lacking in color and positiveness. This is aptly shown in the remark of the novelist, Tom Alden, after Felix has been taken to meet him: " 'I ought to like him. But how can you like a person who isn't there? I like everything he says. But there doesn't seem to be anybody saying it. Darn it all, Helen, he isn't real!' ..".. -- International Record of Medicine and General Practice Clinics, Vol. 113