STEPS GOING DOWN by Philadelphian writer John T. McIntyre is the work of a mature and seasoned talent, instinct with life, rich with experience, yet spectacularly exciting, and most magnificently modern in spirit. It is something more than the product of literary craftsman of the first order: it is a recreation of the very pulse of the life of men and women today. Seldom has so memorable a novel appeared, or one which reveals more powerfully the shape of human living and experience. First published in 1936, John T. McIntyre's novel was selected as the American Contender in the All-Nations Prize Novel Competition, sponsored by the Literary Guild, Warner Brothers, and publishers in some eleven foreign countries. In John T. McIntyre's novel I think we have come upon a fresh note in American fiction, a book that may serve as a reviving influence in a field with which most readers have become impatient. Mr. McIntyre has contrived to represent a new, hard deflated, American mood with superb realism. His book comes to us with sirens screaming, at 80 miles an hour. -William Soskin I had read no more than two or three pages of STEPS GOING DOWN when I stopped thinking of it as a novel and began to feel it as a history of actual persons. There is hardly a page without an act, thought, or speech which is as natural as experience. -Carl Van Doren
