1939: Literature, American

The publishing year in the United States was marked by one towering biography that will be remembered as long as anything in America is read; two novels whose sweeping popularity was due as much to intense personal feeling on subjects of great timeliness as to strictly literary merit; the culminating volume of a stimulating and provocative historical analysis of American civilization; and a 'first book,' by an author otherwise unknown to literature, attracting comparatively slight attention from the general public in America at the time of its appearance, that may prove to be, if history follows the hopes of America, the most influential publication of the year.

These are all to be found in the following survey; otherwise the year was noticeable for the number of historical novels, the general preference for an American scene in fiction and an American subject in biography and the general excellence of the latter, and the rapidity with which most books of information and advice on current affairs went out of print. A general confusion of ideologies, apparent before the outbreak of war in Europe and intensified by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact, brought about an atmosphere of unrest by no means conducive to production of pure literature; a distinctive feature of the year's books was an effort to be timely that made many of them ephemeral.

Biography.

The most important literary event of 1939 in America, and the one by which the year will go down in our literary history, was the completion, by the four massive volumes of Abraham Lincoln: the War Years, of the monumental biography by Carl Sandburg, whose first two volumes, Abraham Lincoln: the Prairie Years, appeared in 1926. A definitive work, this not only draws upon sources published and unpublished, but incorporates so much source material in the work itself that its importance to historians cannot be over-estimated, while it may be confidently predicted that the personality of the President emerging from this record will be that by which future generations will know him.

Apart from the Lincoln biography, the year was marked by valuable accessions to historical biography, books that must form part of the equipment of American reference libraries. The seventh and eighth volumes of Ray Stannard Baker's Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters brought that authorized record to a close. Burton J. Hendrick's Statesmen of the Lost Cause presented Jefferson Davis and his cabinet and the problems with which they wrestled. A selection of letters and diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett, appeared in Lincoln and the Civil War, John Tyler, by Oliver Perry Chitwood, showed a much-maligned Chief Executive as a champion of the Old South unjustly treated by history. Future historians of our closer background must reckon with The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, by Henry F. Pringle, which has the advantage of being 'authorized but not official,' and draw upon The Incredible Era; life and times of Warren Gamaliel Harding by Samuel Hopkins Adams, author in 1926 of Revelry, a much-discussed novel about this administration. A perennially interesting controversy was reopened in Allen Nevins's Fremont; a vivid biography of Daniel Boone that bids fair to be definitive appeared in John Bakeless's Master of the Wilderness; a popular portrait treated its subject fairly in David Loth's Alexander Hamilton; while, as the year closed, J. Pierpont Morgan: An Intimate Portrait was given to the world by Herbert L. Satterlee.

In literary biography first place belongs to Henry Seidel Canby's Thoreau, a scholarly work already accepted as definitive. Townsend Scudder gave a lively account of the married life of the Sage of Chelsea in Jane Welsh Carlyle. Mabel L. Robinson's Runner of the Mountain Tops was the first biography of Louis Agassiz to appear, and Man of Glory, by Thomas Rourke, the most comprehensive one in English of Simon Bolivar. The story of Anton Rubinstein and his brother, and of changing conditions of musicians in their time, appeared in Free Artist, by Catherine Drinker Bowen; while in the field of social history the future may draw on In Winter We Flourish: The Life and letters of Sarah Peter, by Anna S. McAllister, for a picture of the civic life of early Cincinnati.

Autobiography.

This was a year in which a generation of fighters for social reform and the general betterment of American life reached a time of life when autobiography is most likely to be written. Autobiographies of 1939 will for this reason contribute to an usual degree to the equipment of future social historians of this country. Fighting Years, by Oswald Garrison Villard; Fighting for Life, by S. Josephine Baker, describing the struggle for establishment of preventive medicine in child care as a government function; All in the Day's Work by Ida M. Tarbell, written in the eighties of a life still active in welfare; Flowing Stream, by Florence Finch Kelly, the distillation of fifty-six years of newspaper work; and A Victorian in the Modern World, by Hutchins Hapgood, a record whose title is milder than its text, have thus special reason for survival. The picture of American life in the widely popular Country Lawyer, Bellamy Partridge's life of his father, and of the part taken by women in the large metropolitan department store, as shown in Hortense Odlum's A Woman's Place, will be of like though lesser value. The opening volume of two projected autobiographies of unusual length was published this year: Tar Heel Editor, by Josephus Daniels the journalist and diplomat, and Across the Busy Years by Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University. The outstanding success among literary autobiographies was that of William Lyon Phelps' Autobiography with Letters, nearly a thousand pages of friendships and enthusiasms. Edna Ferber's A Peculiar Treasure was another to reach a wide audience; it was a book with a purpose, the treasure being that of Jewish heritage. Hardly a Man Is Now Alive, the autobiography of Dan Beard, founder of the Boy Scouts, teems with anecdotes bearing on the intimate history of America from the days of Mark Twain. Poetry and the arts were represented by Louis Untermeyer's From Another World, George Biddle's An American Artist's Story, Katharine Cornell's I Wanted to be an Actress, and Sidney Honier's My Wife and I. Edith Bolling Wilson produced, in My Memoir, a personal side-light on the closing years of Woodrow Wilson's career, especially the President's post-war visit to Europe. A surprise item was Maud, diaries from 1881 to 1895 of Isabella Maud Rittenhouse, edited by R. Strout from personal journals of a typical enterprising young woman living in Cairo, Ill. between 1882 and 1895, and giving her life and loves to her diary in violet ink and in detail delightful to the student of the times; this immense volume at once caught popular fancy.

Fiction.

The sensation of the year in fiction was made and sustained throughout its course by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, an indignantly sympathetic presentation of the plight of small farmers and sharecroppers of the Southwest, driven from their homes, moving hopefully toward disillusion in California. This was the first choice of critical as well as popular opinion, in spite of an unblinking realism that brought its language under the ban of many libraries. The same agreement of critics and public marked the great popular success of Escape by the pseudonymous 'Ethel Vance,' for the suspense sustained throughout this breath-holding story of a woman's rescue from Nazi Germany was due not only to its events, but to deft handling of psychological factors. The enormous posthumous The Web and the Rock, by Thomas Wolfe, was another noteworthy publication; a posthumous novel of Zona Gale, Magna, also appeared.

Otherwise a noticeable feature of the year was the publication of so many novels of American history, for the most part long and leisurely, so spaced that if laid end to end they would almost make a fictionized history of the nation. These began early in the year with The Tree of Liberty, by Elizabeth Page, a family chronicle whose popularity revived a general interest in collateral reading about the principles of Jefferson and Hamilton, and went steadily on with Next to Valour, John Jennings's romance of the French and Indian War; Guns of Burgoyne by Bruce Lancaster, laid during the Saratoga Campaign of the Revolution; If Not Victory, by Frank O. Hough, taking place in the Neutral Ground of Westchester during the Revolution; Conceived in Liberty, by Howard Melvin Fast, the grim realities of Valley Forge as a private knew them; and Drums at Dusk by Arna Bontemps, a romantic novel of Toussaint and the uprising in Haiti during the French Revolution. The Land is Bright by Archie Binns, a tale of what took place during the migration to Oregon during the fifties; Chard Powers Smith's Artillery of Time, from the fifties on; Bitter Creek, by James Boyd, in the West of the seventies; Nebraska Coast, by Clyde Brion Davis, happening on the frontier of this state in the sixties as experienced by an anti-war man from York state; Francis Griswold's A Sea Island Lady, a family chronicle in the neighborhood of Beaufort, S. C., from the Civil War to the 1920's; the Harper Prize Novel, Children of God by Vardis Fisher, was the story of the Mormon migration. Historical fiction has in general kept closely to the American scene, the chief exceptions being the biographical novel Queen Anne Boleyn, by Francis Hackett, a sound biographer of this period; Our Lives Have Just Begun by Henry Myers, a sensitive study of the Children's Crusade; and The Torguts, by W. L. River, a panorama of the tremendous migration of an Asiatic horde from the Volga to its ancestral home in China in 1770.

John P. Marquand, winner of the 1938 Pulitzer Fiction Prize with The Late George Apley, pursued the same course of devastating satire in Wickford Point early in the season, and Christopher Morley's Kitty Foyle, just as the year was ending, paused on its way to the movies to satirize Philadelphia's Main Line. Disillusion in the revolutionary movement marked John Dos Passos's Adventures of a Young Man; J. T. Farrell's biting Tommy Gallagher gave the background of an anti-Semite newspaper vendor; and The Heroes of Millen Brand's novel were in a Soldiers' Home, though their experiences had not reached the depths of the living dead man in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun. Mari Sandoz's violent Capital City is laid in a state not named on the map, west of the Mississippi, with labor and other social upheavals in progress. Stella Morgan's timely Again the River showed the flood problem in action; Dorothy Canfield's Seasoned Timber the impact of anti-Semitic arguments, financial and otherwise, upon the unyielding liberalism of a Vermont academy; William Faulkner sent out in one volume two melodramatic novels entitled The Wild Palms, and Du Bose Heyward continued his studies of Negro life by a novel laid in the Virgin Islands, The Star-Spangled Virgin. First novels were not in general particularly promising, but those of them which attracted attention were Christ in Concrete, by Pietro di Donato, an Italian bricklayer in America, Night Rider, by Robert Penn Warren, a story of the tobacco war in Kentucky in the 1900's, and Purslane, a regional novel of distinction by Bernice Harris, showing the life of cotton farmers. Otherwise regional novels were not noteworthy save for those among novels already mentioned and a present-day novel of Oklahoma tenant farmers, The Stricklands, by Edwin M. Lanham. Yet the greater number of our novels stayed well within the boundaries of the United States, the chief exceptions being Pearl Buck's The Patriot, laid in contemporary China; Ararat, by Elgin Groseclose, whose scene is the region around this Biblical mountain south of the Black Sea and whose historical basis is used for philosophic purposes; Illusion in Java, an idyllic novel of island life by Gene Fowler; and Peace Under Earth, by Paul Beaujon, an American working in London, which goes clean off the map of the present to an underground England of 1946.

History.

The tremendous number of titles on the publishing lists of the year could be materially reduced, and will be in this survey, by leaving out personal reminiscences of newspaper correspondents and reports on what was going on in Europe at the time the book was written and had gone into thin air almost before it was printed. Exception must certainly be made, however, of Reaching for the Stars, by Nora Waln, a personal account of a friendly visitor's life inside Nazi Germany, by one whose sympathies with a land of music and romance had been long allied with a Quaker love of peace and goodwill; the progressive disillusion of this well-wisher made the book one of the most telling blows at the totalitarian system that reached the great American public this year. John Gunther's Inside Asia stands out among books about the Far Eastern situation as his Inside Europe — now subject to yearly revision in order to maintain its timeliness — still stands out in this field. Among books of what might be called American advice to Europe, one may perhaps prove to be the American book of the year most influential in history; Clarence K. Streit's Union Now; a Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic, which though well-received by most American critics attracted slight attention from our general reading public, was more widely and favorably discussed abroad than anything else in its class, and continues to attract serious consideration.

In the year's contributions to American history, apart from those offered by biography or illuminated by fiction, the most brilliant was America in Mid-Passage, the third volume of a study of our social and intellectual development, Rise of American Civilization, by Charles A. and Mary R. Beard; this volume begins in the time of the Coolidge régime in the middle 1920's and carries the same provocative brilliance and informative qualities of the earlier volumes to the present day; it began in 1927, and a new and enlarged edition carried it through the Hoover administration in 1933. The first full-length history of the Ku Klux Klan appeared in The Invisible Empire, by Stanley Horn, including source material of unusual interest. A comprehensive and scholarly treatise, The Senate of the United States: its history and practice, by George Henry Haynes, though essentially historical in scope, covered also every phase of Senatorial practice and precedents. Leland DeWitt Baldwin's Whiskey Rebels, a monograph on the Insurrection of 1794; The Rise of American Naval Power, by Harold and Margaret Sprout, extending from 1776 to 1918; Vermont in the Making, by Matt Bushnell Jones, showing the dramatic conflict of jurisdiction that marked the State's early days and was not settled until recent times; The Rise of New York Port, by Robert G. Albion and Jennie B. Pope, a history of its coastwise and foreign commerce from 1815 to 1860; The Protestant Crusade: 1800-1860, by Ray Allen Billington, a study of the origins of American nativism; and America's Silver Age, by Gerald White Johnson, which surveys our history from 1800 to 1850 as shown in the statecraft of Clay, Webster and Calhoun, are noteworthy additions to serious historical research.

Among popular historical surveys Stanley Vestal's The Old Santa Fe Trail and Joseph Henry Jackson's Tintypes in Gold had especial appeal; the latter is a group of four portraits of picturesque robbers and bandits of Gold Rush days. The Rivers of America Series, a generally popular undertaking which presents the history, legend and romance of the country as affected by its great waterways, progressed during 1939 with The Hudson, by Carl Carmer; The James, by Blair Niles; and The Sacramento, by Julian Dana; The Wabash, by William E. Wilson was promised for publication early in the opening year. A dramatic and factually reliable history of the cattle industry, The Trampling Herd, by Paul I. Wellman, and Stewart Holbrook's Iron Brew, a spirited dash through the iron and steel industry of the United States, added zest to general history. The monumental record Cape Horn, by the late Felix Riesenberg, extending from its discovery to the present, closed the career of this trustworthy historian and recorder of the sea; and in the field of what might be called contemporary history two works attracted special attention: Industrial Valley, by Ruth McKenney, in which the life of the rubber workers of Akron, Ohio, from 1932 to the ending of the strike of 1936 was presented with only two names fictionized, and Factories in the Field, by Carey McWilliams, which came out not long after The Grapes of Wrath and provided a background of information on the desperate plight of the migratory farm worker in California that reinforced the indignation the novel aroused. Mention should also be made, in presenting the subject of popularized history, of The Heritage of America, edited by Henry Steele Commager and Allen Nevins, a fine collection of 252 documentary narratives selected and arranged to form a practically continuous history of this country from Leif Ericson to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Short Stories and Essays.

The short story kept chiefly to magazines, relatively few collections reaching book form. Of these the most distinguished examples of the art were Tales before Midnight, by Stephen Vincent Benét, historical and modern, in the American idiom; a collection of the mordant and memorable stories of Dorothy Parker, Here Lies; and three long short stories — the form in which some of America's most distinctive contributions to fiction have appeared — in one volume, Pale Horse, Palz Rider, by Katharine Anne Porter. The short story continues one of the most interesting and significant features of what has been somewhat wishfully described as a renascence of American literature, but its influence is exerted in periodical rather than in permanent form.

This year the essay languished upon publishing lists: Irwin Edman's A Philosopher's Holiday appeared late in 1938 and through the year rolled up an appreciative audience for an autobiographical portrait produced by sketches from memory set down in essay form. Essays previously published were collected with new material in The Privilege of Age, by Vida D. Scudder, to show 'reaction to a changing world from 1913 to 1939,' and the humorous essay reached a high level of literary merit in the gaiety and good sense of Quo Vadimus? or, The Case for the Bicycle, by E. B. White of the magazine The New Yorker. In criticism, two works on Shakespeare led the field: the rich and sensitive appreciation of a poet in Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare, and the lively result of scholarly research in Esther Cloudman Dunn's Shakespeare in America, a record of production and general infiltration into American thought for two centuries.

Poetry.

The outstanding event of the year in poetry was, as expected, the appearance of Huntsman, What Quarry? by Edna St. Vincent Millay, lyrics and sonnets some of which expressed the poet's sympathy with Czechoslovakia, China and Spain, while others sang in memory of the poet Elinor Wylie. Archibald MacLeish, whose experiments in radio drama have done much to vitalize our verse by lifting it into its old realm of sound, made another attempt at popular appeal by Air Raid, a half-hour broadcast later appearing in print. Kenneth Fearing's Dead Reckoning maintained the emotional pressure of the time in vehement lyrics. Muriel Rukeyser's A Turning Wind was marked by intense feeling. David Morton turned to nature in the brief poems of All in One Breath. Among first books of verse promising well for the future were Lines at Intersection, by Josephine Miles, and The Red Kite, by Lloyd Frankenberg. The verse-novel, lately a subject of American experiment, was represented through Each to the Other, by Christopher La Farge, a study of unhappy marriage and its effect upon a son's philosophy of life, and Death Loses a Pair of Wings, by Robin Lampson, a novel in cadence telling the story of the conquest of yellow fever by General Gorgas. Regional poetry was offered by an accomplished interpreter of Green Mountain life, Walter Hard, in Vermont Valley, one hundred pieces about Vermont folks; and by two newcomers who at once attracted attention, Louise McNeill, whose Ganley Mountain described the background and people of part of West Virginia in vigorous verse, and Kenneth Porter, whose High Plains dealt chiefly with the life and soil of Kansas. A disquieting feature of recent American poetry has been the increasing tendency of poets to write for each other, and to lose in consequence, the reinforcement of popular interest, seldom concerned with technique.

Printed Plays.

The rapidly spreading custom of committing a play to print even while it still holds the boards has this year both enriched and enlivened the nation's reading-matter. The Little Foxes, by Lillian Hellman, an incisive study of a family ready and able to stop at nothing on its path to raising necessary cash, stood the test of print so well that its economy of words and clarity of focus were even more plainly evident than at first view on the stage. The smashing farce-satire of The Man Who Came to Dinner, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, was welcomed as gladly in book form as on Broadway and the road; satire verging on farce marked Clare Boothe's burlesque of movie methods, Kiss the Boys Good-bye; Thornton Wilder, who won last year's Pulitzer Play prize with Our Town, produced this year The Merchant of Yonkers, called by himself a farce, but qualifying rather as light comedy of life in that region in the eighties. Maxwell Anderson was represented in print by two plays, the popular Knickerbocker Holiday, a musical comedy based on Knickerbocker's History of New York, and Key largo, a verse-play beginning on a hill held in Spain by American volunteers and continuing in the Florida retreat of a deserter (and by The Essence of Tragedy, a collection of articles and papers defending poetic drama). The tumultuous talents of William Saroyan, breaking out this year on the stage, reached print in The Time of Your Life, a Broadway success, and My Heart's in the Highlands, given first by the Group Theatre and then by the Theatre Guild. Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which won the year's Pulitzer award, reads as well as it acts. A presentation in contemporary terms of the last days of Christ upon earth, Family Portrait, by Lenore Coffin and William J. Cowen, made a striking stage success and will remain as a noteworthy addition to our dramatic literature. Philip Barry's Here Come the Clowns received better treatment from literary than dramatic critics in their respective reviews of a study of the problem of evil as it confronts a worn-out stage-hand. Skylark, by Samson Raphaelson, a contemporary version of the home vs. business problem; Ladies and Gentlemen, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, a well-received vehicle for the art of Helen Hayes; and the plays of social protest, The Gentle People, by Irwin Shaw, and Rocket to the Moon, by Clifford Odets, also reached print, while as usual the leading scenes of ten popular successes, with connecting narrative, were given in 'The Best Plays of 1938-1939,' edited by Burns Mantle, an annual that has become a feature of dramatic documentation in this country.

Bernice Harris's one-act Folk-Plays of Eastern Carolina, by the author of the novel Purslane, appeared in one volume as another evidence of the value of The Carolina Playmakers, the enterprise so long conducted at the University of North Carolina by Frederick H. Koch. Another collection of plays by a writer associated with the earlier days of this group was Out of the South, by Paul Green, while Professor Koch edited a large collection of American Folk Plays, successfully produced by college groups.

Scholarly research and popular appeal united in a study of a little-known field, Dublin Theatres and Theatre Customs, 1637-1820, by La Tourette Stockwell. George Jean Nathan's theatrical criticisms appeared as Encyclopedia of the Theatre, a collection of characteristic comments and reflections. Otherwise theatrical criticism was limited to the press.

Pulitzer Awards.

All the Pulitzer Prize awards for literature and the drama this year set official seal upon previously expressed popular approval. The award for 'a distinguished novel preferably dealing with American life,' went to The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a decision no one showed a tendency to dispute. Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois won the prize for 'the original American play, performed in New York, which shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage, dealing preferably with American life,' rousing general satisfaction from the country at large; while the selection of Carl Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin for the Biography Prize, 'teaching patriotism and unselfish services to people,' was generally foreseen and universally commended. Frank Luther Mott's History of American Magazines, a work in progress now in its third volume with one and perhaps two more to come, received the History award, and the Poetry Prize went to a distinguished early exponent of the Imagist ideal, John Gould Fletcher, whose Selected Poems, published and unpublished from 1913 to the present, had appeared in 1938. See also DRAMA.