SOURCE: “A Novel Hammered Out of Experience,” in Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XI, No. 41, April 27, 1935, pp. 645, 649.

In the following review, DeVoto praises Roll River as a first-rate example of American realism but admits that the book will not likely find a wide audience.

There are a number of ways to write that undefined entity, the American novel. Mr. Wolfe has recently exhibited one way: to print the word “America” ten thousand times, to depict young Faustus as a victim of manic-depressive insanity, to fill the stage with Mardi Gras grotesques who suffer from compulsion neuroses and walk on stilts and always speak as if firing by battery, to look at everything through the lens of an infantile regression which makes a Dutchess County kitchen or a glimpse of a way station on the main line equally important with the death of one's father and the first meeting...