Dear A. W.:—
… Five Alone is such a magnificently balanced bit of atmosphere and inevitability that I don't see how any fully awake and sober editor could possibly reject it. The steady growth of your work is surely heartening to see, and I can easily imagine what your place in the literary field will be a decade hence. About the objection to the odd constructions typified by "she walking out" … or "she perfectly natural" …, I must say that I am inclined to agree with the pedagogical commentator. These constructions, whatever their abstract syntactical merits, are so conspicuously unidiomatic that they tend to attract attention to themselves and thus halt the imaginative progress of the reader. An author's object should be the art which conceals art, hence obtrusive singularity is always to be shunned…. This story is certainly a most remarkable piece of work—full of the horror (also to be noted in early New England) of exaggerated instincts in remote and lonely places. I can't think of anything that could be done to better it as a whole….
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Derleth, August (William) 1909–1971: Critical Essay by H P [h. P. Lovecraft] Access Pass.
