Lindsay was typecast by his contemporaries as a "jazz poet" an appellation kept alive by his exhausting but financially essential reading tours. This selection of his letters shows his yearning to be a poetic savior, an American original, his instinctive appreciation of the infant movie industry's importance, and the hidden (self-hidden) struggle to escape from the iron hand of his mother. They also reveal the basic shallowness of his intellect and talent, despite a capacity for sensing the new demands made on literature by America and the twentieth century.