George Horace Lorimer

“ I have never met anyone with a more absolutely faultless manner. He both explained and apologized for the Canyon's crudities in one breath. I rather gathered that he would have found the geology of the Alps more to his liking, if certain events had not made them temporarily inaccessible to American tourists of refinement. I do not think that Van had very much geology, but I felt as I listened that he had known the Canyon in a way that the learned Easterner would never know it. ”

“ First and last Van's ancestors must have met every one and have done everything worth while, from the days when they were happy, innocent troglodytes on up. Van himself used all their experiences and emotions in his stories—their loves, their hates, their generosities, their meannesses, their fights, their strugglings up—but most of all their splendid cleanness. For Van, too, lived a man's life and wrote man stuff. Love and sex get small place in his stories. Most men who have a clean punch in their fists have a clean punch in their hearts, too ”

“ In fact he was all over the lot, appraising the values of custard-pie drama for fiction, probing the holiest emotions and the make-up of the he-dolls; lazying around and swapping stories with the extra men, giving his long wolf howl in the mob scenes, and looming vaguely through the smoke while the Battle of Gettysburg raged around him and the director, or while heroic firemen carried beautiful, helpless ladies out of burning buildings. ”