VACHEL LINDSAY

An important biography, and undoubtedly the definitive life of Vachel Lindsay. With Edgar Lee Masters' name as biographer, it should have an assured sale, to the literary crowd, to public libraries and college and high school libraries....Masters goes deeply into Vachel Lindsay's inheritance, on both sides, traces, throughout his life, the tremendous influence of both parents, and of a grandfather as well, and paints a detailed picture of his strange and roving life, against a period when America was groping toward independence in literature. The man himself --Vachel Lindsay -- emerges as intellectual beyond his years, in youth, as adolescent in his psychology, throughout his maturity. His work is his life, self-conscious, antagonistic, defiant, self-revealing, essentially of America -- and it fits into the Jigsaw puzzle of a roving life, with a comparatively brief critical appraisal at the end. A literary biography rather than a human one -- and will appeal on that ground.