I hope that the protagonist will illustrate in his own experience every one of us--not merely the sensitive young fellow in conflict with his town, his family, the little world around him; not merely the sensitive young fellow in love, and so concerned with his little universe of love that he thinks it is the whole universe--but all of these things and much more. These things, while important, are subordinate to the plan of the book; being young and in love and in the city are only a part of the whole adventure of apprenticeship and discovery. This novel, then, marks not only a turning away from the books I have written in the past, but a genuine spiritual and artistic change. It is the most objective novel that I have written. I have invented characters who are compacted from the whole amalgam and consonance of seeing, feeling, thinking, living, and knowing many people. I have sought, through free creation, a release of my inventive power. Finally, the novel has in it, from first to last, a strong element of satiric exaggeration: not only because it belongs to the nature of the story--"the innocent man" discovering life--but because satiric exaggeration also belongs to the nature of life, and particularly American life.
