SOURCE: "Modern American Writing," in New York Herald Tribune Books, September 24, 1933, p. 8.

Burnett was an American critic, journalist, and editor. In the following review of We Are the Living, he greatly admires Caldwell's ability to "push through to the core of feeling" in the stories in the collection.

Erskine Caldwell spends his winters in Georgia and his summers in Maine. Since he, of all the younger American short story writers, is one of the most naturally steeped in the special American qualities of his background, We Are the Living should interest not only followers of his artistic word, but also observers of the native mores.

Caldwell was not one of the American younger generation who went to Paris; when some of the rest of us were picking up a little French and less German, Caldwell was down among the cotton pickers or up among the people in the...