British readers may have heard of Kenneth Rexroth as a father-figure of the Beats. That role has been exaggerated, even by grateful Beats themselves. Insufficient credit has been granted to Rexroth's identity as an old-fashioned, honest-to-God man of letters of downright independence of mind….

Rexroth and his books are American in a way few people know enough about. He is of the America that can be caricatured or dismissed only through prejudice….

What Rexroth evokes in his rambling, lucid, magnanimous book [An Autobiographical Novel] is his own growing up through precocious perception and experience of American radicalism, middle-class life, American literature, and the excitements of European modernism. It is a story of American promise and its decline. His childhood was remarkable by any standards; the book, I suspect, is called 'a novel' for the reason that he rubbed against the well-known or the great so consistently for it...