The language of Mr. Fowler has no structure and no harmonics. It is something that is exhaled like breath or exuded like perspiration. And yet the fuzzy raffish style of this book has its special appropriateness to the subject: it is a literary equivalent for the atmosphere in which the events take place. What we get here is the folklore of the Barrymores; and, as you read, you can smell the aroma of the Manhattans and highballs and cigars of the old Hoffman House and the Knickerbocker bar, you seem to drift on the long late conversations at the Players club and the Lambs on which the Barrymore mythology was nourished. John Barrymore did in a sense live his legend; but you cannot really feel its validity unless you see it presented in terms of the smoking room, the city room, the green room, of the mirrors behind the bar and the shaded lamps at the club, all elements of urban life themselves rather remotely associated with the realities of common day...

John Barrymore was a gifted person, and he counted for something in the life of his time. The extracts from his letters and diaries which Mr. Fowler has included in this book show his wit and his sensibility, and a refractory integrity of character which has nothing in common with the temperament of the ordinary popular actor. He belonged to an American tradition of the high-strung man of talent who makes hay of the American standards—runs amuck, takes to dissipation and is broken down young. But poor Barrymore never realized himself in either his painting or his acting as, say, Poe or Stephen Crane did in his writing, and he never found the right thing to do or be. It was only when some aspect of a character he was playing coincided with some aspect of his own personality that he was really creative on the stage.