1940: Literature, American

The year 1940 in American publishing was one in regard to which generalities would be useless; indeed impossible. Life and literature are too closely knit for books printed during these twelve months in America not to show the state of mind of a country forced by events so rapidly to adjust itself to a new world orientation, further complicated by a presidential election in which, for these very reasons, all precedents were reversed. There has not been in years a season in which so many books lost, not only their timeliness, but their value, almost before their print was set. The pamphlet flourished, and slim little books, hastily prepared, attacked or answered one another like long-distance debaters. In fiction, the atmosphere of the United States was by no means favorable to the discovery or encouragement of new authors, and few first novels made anything approaching a sensation. In every field the best showing was made by books that had been in preparation long before the year began, and in fiction the most important and significant novels came from veteran authors.

Fiction.

The instant success of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls may have had, with the general public, a reason in the burning timeliness of its subject, the tragic days of the late war in Spain; with the critics its acclaim arose quite as much from a masterly control of emotion and material that added dignity to such sincere feeling as marked that famous novel of another war, Farewell to Arms. Coming toward the close of the year, its rising popularity was soon matched by another pre-Christmas publication, Oliver Wiswell, by Kenneth Roberts, whose success as the year ended seemed likely to extend well into 1941; this historical novel of the American Revolution, holding close attention for some seven hundred pages, departs from national habits of American fiction by showing the conflict from the Tory side. Just as the year was ending, a major work of Willa Cather appeared: the scene of Sapphira and the Slave Girl returns to her native Virginia before the Civil War. Chad Hanna, by Walter D. Edmonds earned nationwide popularity earlier in the season by a picaresque, amusing record of a Mohawk Valley circus in the 1830's; in the same Spring season Conrad Richter's The Trees gave us a novel likely to last, in which backwoods pioneers migrated from Pennsylvania, after the Revolution, into the forests of unbroken Ohio wilderness country. The Atlantic Monthly Prize of $10,000 went to a story of life in a Tientsin boarding-house, precariously maintained by a lovable family of Russian exiles: The Family, by Nina Fedorova. The author is an American by recent adoption and this, her first novel, was at once taken to the heart of the American public for its wise, humorous humanity. Thomas Wolfe's posthumous You Can't Go Home Again continued the fortunes of George Webber, and in Robert Nathan's Portrait of Jennie a distinctive talent found a congenial subject. Late in the season Hildreth, by Harlow Estes, won another $10,000 prize award, and the Pulitzer Prize awarded this year went to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Historical fiction spread fairly evenly over the Revolution, the Civil War, and the period between them. River Out of Eden, by Shirley Seifert, is the Mississippi before the Revolution; John Erskine's Give Me Liberty, a biographical novel of Patrick Henry; Raleigh's Eden, by Inglis Fletcher, North Carolina before and during the Revolution; Come Spring, by Ben Ames Williams, Maine in the same period, and Stars on the Sea, by Van Wyck Mason, its period of privateering. This Land Is Ours, by Louis Zara, follows the long life of a survivor of Braddock's Defeat; The Promised Land, by James Howell Street, goes from Georgia to Mississippi, from 1784 to 1817; Bruce Lancaster's For Us the Living shows pioneer Kentucky and the youth of Abraham Lincoln. On the Long Tide, by Laura Krey, displays Texan struggles for independence; Mighty Mountain, by Archie Binns, is in the pioneer period of Puget Sound settlement; Cornelia Spencer's China Trader shows sailing ships in the days of the China Trade; and Show Me a Land, by Clark McMeekin, extends its theme from England in 1816 to the first Kentucky Derby. The Civil War novels were Foundation Stone, Lella Warren, beginning in 1820 and doing for Alabama much the same that Miss Mitchell's novel did for Georgia; From What Dark Roots, by Frances Findley, from 1839 to the Civil War with a Natchez man making a name for himself in New York State; Red Lanterns on St. Michael's, by Thornwell Jacobs, South Carolina in the conflict; and Beckoning Ridge, by Emerson Waldman, simple folk caught between the lines.

Canadian history was represented by Julia Altorcchi's fur trading romance, Wolves Against the Moon; Evelyn Eaton's Quietly My Captain Waits, in the time of Frontenac; and Iola Fuller's Indian story, The Loon Feather, which won the Avery Hopwood Prize. King's Row, by Henry Bellaman, took in the turn of the century in the United States; Harold Sinclair's Years of Growth continued his American Years; and Stephen Longstreet's realistic Decade: 1929-1939, covered in fiction just the span of Frederick L. Allen's mordant record of fact, Since Yesterday.

Regional fiction continued to keep people reading; a curious tendency was to show the American scene through the eyes of a child or an adolescent. Thus Jake Falstaff's posthumous Jacoby's Corners, is Ohio farming country as a small boy remembered it; The Canyon, by Peter Viertel, an adolescent's problems in southern California, and Walk Like a Mortal, by Dan Wickenden, similar problems on Long Island; For Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, by George Victor Martin, from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old girl in Wisconsin, and Small Potatoes, by Emily Muir, that of a small boy among Maine fishers and farmers.

The South was regional fiction's favorite this year: The Hawk's Done Gone, by Mildred Haun, is laid in the Tennessee mountains; Spring Will Come Again, by Florence Palmer, in cotton country, Alabama, in the eighties; God Has a Long Face, by Robert Wilder, a civil war veteran taming the wilderness in Florida; River of Earth, by James Still, coal camps of Kentucky; The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers, shows Georgia in a striking first novel; This Side of Glory, by Gwen Bristow, one of a series of Louisiana novels; Trouble in July, by Erskine Caldwell, a Georgia lynching; The Hamlet, by William Faulkner, a decadent community in Mississippi; and Geese in the Forum, by Lawrence Watkin, a satiric study of life in a Southern college town.

New England was represented by Uncle Snowball, Frances Frost's study of the career and influence of a hired man; The Black Winds Blow, by Frances Colby, family complications in Boston; Be Thou the Bride, by Christine Weston, Maine; and Such Is the Kingdom, by Thomas Sugrue, Irish Americans in Connecticut. Moving over the map we had The Unwilling Journey, by Clarence Pendleton Lee, Arkansas; Mother of the Smiths, by Lorraine Carr, an obscure heroine of present-day New Mexico; Marta Roberts' Tumbleweeds, Mexicans in California; Moon Tide, by Willard Robertson, a memorable first novel of the San Pedro waterfront; and Swift Flows the River, by Nard Jones, the river being the Columbia; while Sinclair Lewis toured the country in Bethel Merriday with actors on the road.

The most distinguished novel to deal with a social problem of today was Richard Wright's Native Son, presenting the Negro criminal as a product of our civilization. Though the lynching in The Ox-Bow Incident, by Walter Von Tilburg Clark, took place in the eighties, the problem remains. Labor troubles inspired The Underground Stream, by Albert Maltz, with scene laid in Detroit, 1936; Meyer Levin's Citizens treated of the Memorial Day riots of 1937; and Fred Rothermell's The Ghostland dealt with dust bowl distress in the Ozarks. Father and Son, by James T. Farrell, kept up the difficulties of Danny O'Neill; Winter Term, by John Harriman, showed the workings of a boys' prep school. In Alice Tisdale Hobart's Their Own Country, two Americans returning from China encountered the depression in New York and Kansas. Personal problems arising from social conditions inspired Through the House Door, by Helen Hull, Josephine Lawrence's But You Are Young, a sympathetic showing of the dependence of a family on a young wage-earner; and even Isabel Paterson's study of modern love, If It Prove Fair Weather, had its problem. Dr. Dogbody's Leg, by James Norman Hall, revived the typical 'tall tale' at its best, and Susan Glaspell's popular Morning Is Near Us gave a psychological slant to a mystery story.

In an effort to 'foster the Hemingways, the Ferbers and the Steinbecks of the future,' a selection of ten books by new writers was made by critics interested in a series of nationally popular literary meetings in New York, on which the American entries were as follows: China Trader, by Cornelia Spencer, God Has a Long Face, by Robert Wilder, and Moon Tide, by Willard Robertson already described in this report; Olives on the Apple Tree, by Guido D'Agostino, a novel about Italians coming to America to make their way in a new country and forgetting their native heritage; Deep Grow the Roots, by Mari Tomasi, a novel of peasants in Piedmont and their involvement in the Ethiopian War, the author being a Vermonter of Turin ancestry; The Devil and the Doctor, by David H. Keller, a homespun tale whose fantasy disguises genuine satire; Tiger, Tiger, by Max White, the evolution and development of a celebrated painter; and a biography of the type of the Clarence Day books but with a quite different scene, The Vanishing Virginian, by Rebecca Yancey Williams, the story of her father, Cap'n Bob Yancey.

Biography.

There was no biography of the monumental character of Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: the War Years, whose four volumes won the Pulitzer history prize awarded this year, but George Washington, by Nathaniel W. Stephenson (posthumous) and Waldo H. Dunn presents Washington against his own background and in his own spirit and seems likely to stand for some time at least at the head of his biographies. Mr. Pitt and America's Birthright, by John Cuthbert Long, shows him in relation to our Revolution and to the building of the British Empire. Ethan Allen, by Stewart Holbrook, has the flavor of its time and place. Jonathan Edwards, by Ola E. Winslow, is a study of the period as well as of the man, and so, under far other conditions, is the portrait of Calvin Coolidge: the Man from Vermont, by Claude Fuess. Mr. House of Texas, by Arthur Howden Smith, is a personal tribute with value to future historians of the World War period. One of the most scholarly lives offered this year to the general reader is Lewis Cummings' Alexander the Great, and one of the most popular the adventurous career of the incredible companion of Byron and Shelley, set forth in Margaret Armstrong's Trelawny. Jenny Ballou's Period Piece, a life of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, is the most reliable reconstruction of this particular period that has been offered this generation by a young writer. There were several important musical biographies: Enchanted Wanderer, by Lucy and Richard Stebbins, the life of Carl Maria von Weber; Madeline Goss's Bolero, the life of Maurice Ravel; and Teresa Carreño, by Marta Milanowska, who is professor of music at Vassar. The literary biographies included a valuable study of George Sand, Romantic Rebel, by Felizia Seyd; a balanced presentation of Margaret Fuller, by Mason Wade; the well-documented James Joyce, by Herbert Gorman, and the most reliable of the group biographies of Frances Winwar, Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties. Created Equal by Alma Lutz, reviewed the career of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and was followed by Harriot Stanton Blatch's account of the early suffrage movement in Challenging Years.

In autobiography, scientists led the field. Hugh Young: a Surgeon's Autobiography, is the brilliant story of the head of the Brady Urological Institute in Baltimore; I Remember, by Abraham Flexner, concerns study and teaching, especially of medicine; the beautiful As I Remember Him, by Hans Zinsser, came as nearly as possible to being posthumous; J. M. T. Finney's A Surgeon's Life spans the course of modern medicine; Frontier Doctor, by Urling Campbell Coe, treats of everything in Oregon for years after 1905, including epidemics and range wars. Growing Pains, by Wanda Gag, is a singularly un-retouched series of diaries from her childhood on, showing her early ambitions, struggles, and finally, successes. This Is on Me, by Katharine Brush, is the career of a successful novelist. Confessions of an Individualist, by William Henry Chamberlain, comes from the correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor in Russia and Japan; Country Editor, by Henry S. Hough, stood out among several popular studies of this profession; A Teacher and His Times, by William Adams Brown, covers forty-four years at Union Theological Seminary; and the bravest biography of the year, Alice Bretz's I Begin Again, describes with the utmost courage and simplicity how she built up a lively, non-dependent career after losing her eyesight in middle age.

History.

The year began with a flutter of American books about the causes and course of the war, soon swept off the shelves by the oncoming storm. Scarcely any of these outlived the Battle of Flanders, the survivors were blown up in the Battle of France, and by the time the Battle of Britain was under way a new orientation of the American mind had taken place. Almost the only contribution to current history that holds out as well at the end of the year as in the June days when first it came out is Why Europe Fights by Walter Millis, the best short account of the two decades between the world wars and the most lucid statement of the rise of totalitarian absolutism and the reasons why struggle against it must be world-shaking. It is quite possible that this may prove to be, all things considered, the most influential American book of the year. Of major works of history for the year the work of scholars was carried on by Ralph Henry Gabriel's intellectual history since 1815, The Course of American Democratic Thought; Thomas A. Bailey's Diplomatic History of the American People, the best single-volume work of its kind, wisely illustrated with cartoons; Two Frontiers of Freedom, by John Corbin, a constitutional history from the time of the Revolution, developing the idea of the republic as established by the Founding Fathers; The Politics of Democracy: American Parties in Action, by Edward Pendleton Herring, setting forth our political processes and institutions with engaging good-temper; Mr. Justice Miller and the Supreme Court, by Charles Fairman, a constitutional history from 1862 to 1890; The President Makers, by Matthew Josephson, the technique of leadership from McKinley to Wilson; and the second, concluding volume of James Truslow Adams's historical survey beginning with 1783 and closing with June, 1939: Empire on the Seven Seas: The British Empire.

Several studies of the background and development of our ways of life and habits of thought were offered to the general reader. Foster R. Dulles, in America Learns to Play, produced a history of popular recreation from 1607 to 1940. American Faith: Its Religious, Political and Economic Foundations, completed just before the death of its eminent author, Ernest Sutherland Bates, extends from the Protestant Reformation in Europe to our Civil War. Engines of Democracy, by Roger Burlingame, traces the effect of inventions. Singing Valleys, by Dorothy Giles, is a history of the part taken in America by corn. AP: The Story of News, by Oliver Gramling, is an excitingly written account of the Associated Press from 1848 to the present. One of the finds of the year in the historical field was a first-hand document of the Civil War, I Rode with Stonewall by Henry Kyd Douglas, youngest member of Jackson's staff, a narrative lying neglected in an attic till accidentally brought to light and published by the University of North Carolina. The noteworthy 'Rivers of America' series went on; state histories of a narrative type included Phil Stong's Hawkeyes: A Biography of the State of Iowa, and Harlan Hatcher's Buckeye Country, the career of Ohio. A Seaport Series set off with two exciting narratives: The Port of Gloucester, by James B. Connolly, and Golden Gate: The Story of San Francisco, by Felix Riesenberg, Jr. The nation's early history was represented by The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century by Perry G. Miller, and by Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker's Torchbearer of the Revolution, the story of Bacon's Rebellion and its leader. The Pulitzer Prize for biography went to the seventh and eighth volumes of Ray Stannard Baker's Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters.

The immediate background of today's problems was presented in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, in which photography as a means of exposition presented the case of the Dust Bowl and the consequent move toward California in the late 1930's: The Caribbean, by Walter A. Roberts, a popular history of our 'sea of destiny'; Cadiz to Cathay, by Commander Miles P. Duval, U.S.N., a history of the Panama Canal approved by political scientists as well as by the general reader; Five and Ten, by John K. Winkler, biography amounting to a history of the Woolworth stores; Golden Avalanche, by F. D. Graham and C. R. Whittlesey, a history of the United States gold policy in recent years, and The All-American Front, by Duncan Aikman, a political and psychological survey of reasons for the lack of mutual understanding between the Americas. There was a rush of reports from travellers and refugees, less literature than livres de circonstance, of which chance of survival is strongest for Edmond Taylor's The Strategy of Terror, an analysis of the 'war of nerves' and its major casualties. A contemporary record whose value will not lessen with time is a study of the effects of the Orson Welles hoax that threw so many radio listeners into panic not without portent: The Invasion From Mars, by Cantril, Gaudet and Herzog. History kept closely at home this year; one of its few far-flung lines was Harold Lamb's March of the Barbarians, a popular sweep through the power of the Mongols from Genghis Khan to the close of the thirteenth century.

Travel.

Travel in American books was almost as restricted as in real life: most of it took place on this continent. The author of A Southerner Discovers New England, Jonathan Daniels, travelled for the purpose of social, psychological and economic enlightenment; so did Benjamin Appel in The People Talk, on a cross continent motor trip talking with people about present conditions. Our Southwest, by Erna Fergusson, 'Allo — Goodbye, by Zephine Humphrey, from Vermont to Mexico; Big River to Cross, by Ben Lucian Burman, life on the Mississippi; and Alaska Challenge, by Ruth and William Albee, an adventurous honeymoon, were the chief additions to this group. For foreign parts the leading books were Through China's Wall, Graham Peck's record of a recent expedition; White Water and Black Magic, Richard C. Gill's hunt for the South American drug curare, and Gertrude Stein's moving tribute to a city that fell the day the book was published, Paris, France.

Poetry and Drama.

The White Cliffs, a narrative poem by Alice Duer Miller, describing the life of an American in England, led the poetry of the year in appeal heightened by repeated demands for performance over the radio. The same timeliness marked Edna St. Vincent Millay's Make Bright the Arrows, and her There Are No Islands Any More; Elliott Coleman's An American in Augustland; and the aviation verse of William Rose Benet, With Wings as Eagles. Marie Welch's This Is Our Own, is popular verse at its best. Conrad Aiken's Conversation, took place on Cape Cod; Charles Malam's lyrics in Wagon Weather, in Vermont, and another New England contribution was Wilbert Snow's Maine Tides. Among the offerings of young poets, George Abbe's Wait for These Things, stands out. The Pulitzer Prize went to Mark Van Doren's Collected Poems.

The immensely popular play, Life with Father, based on Clarence Day's book by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay, was an instant success in book form. Other stage presentations made available in print during the year were Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story; Night Music by Clifford Odets; The Male Animal, by James Thurber and Elliott Nugent; Three Plays, by William Saroyan; and the tremendously successful There Shall Be No Night, a war play of the present, by Robert Sherwood. The Pulitzer drama prize went to William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life.

Literary criticism was confined chiefly to newspaper, magazines and other periodical publications, and few books appeared in this class. However, one of the most valuable publications of the year was a survey of literary and cultural history, Van Wyck Brooks's New England: Indian Summer, taking up the study of New England's life and thought where his earlier volume, The Flowering of New England, left off in 1865, and continuing it to 1915 with one of the richest of his books.