1941: Literature, American

There was in 1941 no award of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a decision of the trustees that pleased nobody and irritated not a few. The latter were somewhat mollified by the award, later in the year, of the triennial medal of the Limited Editions Club, for the book published during that interval most likely to become a classic, to Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Fiction.

The outstanding novels of 1941, judging not only by critical opinion but by its popular appeal, were H. M. Pulham, Esq. by J. P. Marquand, another mordant study of Boston society with an unexpectedly sympathetic hero; Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life, a profoundly understanding presentation of life in Virginia in this troubled, expectant generation. Two novels attracted wide attention for their unusual subjects and the skill with which these were handled: Delilah, by Marcus Goodrich, had for heroine a destroyer in Pacific waters, while the heroine of Storm, by George R. Stewart, was a young hurricane whose life-story, charted by the meteorologist who named her, affected human lives and social conditions over a good part of the globe.

Of other novels of contemporary life, social problems were involved in Portulaca, by Bernice Kelly Harris, taking place in a small town among Southern share-croppers; Weeds on the Earth, by Evelyn Bolster, placed in Idaho farm lands; Maritta Wolff's Whistle Stop, an unvarnished tale of Michigan small-town life that won the Avery Hopwood award; The River Rises, by Helen Abbott Beals, the plight of a New England town when a reservoir was built; Booth Tarkington's The Heritage of Hatcher Ide, which pulls out of the depression; Mark's Own, by Sarah Atherton, located in the anthracite mining region of the Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania; Out of This Furnace, by Thomas Bell, five generations of immigrant stock in the steel mills of Homestead; The Long Winter Ends, by Newton G. Thomas, about Cornish miners who settled in the upper peninsula of Michigan; Satan's Sergeants, by Josephine Herbst, summer folks and natives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania; The Sea and the Shore, by Jacland Marmur, on a subject seldom reaching fiction, present-day steamship life; and Something of a Hero, by I. J. Kapstein, career of a patriot from the Civil War to the twenties of this century. For studies of family relations, the more interesting were the Harper Prize novel Marriage is a Private Affair, by Judith Kelly; This Marriage, by Edith Roberts; and the rapidly dramatized series of episodes, Junior Miss, by Sally Benson.

Regional aspects of life were in the ascendancy this year: some of our most characteristic fiction depended upon the place, or part of the country, that it represented. William McFee's well-known Chief Engineer left the sea and settled in Connecticut in Spenlove in Arcady. Mrs. Appleyard's Year, by Louise Andrews Kent, about a lady who corresponds in America to Mrs. Miniver in England, was spent between Boston and Vermont. James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce was in Glendale, California; Mary Ellen Chase's broad canvas in Windswept pictured Maine; the warm humanity of George Sessions Perry's Texas farm-story Hold Autumn in Your Hand caused it to be treasured; affectionate remembrance of Christmas at Jacoby's Corner in Jake Falstaff's Ohio novelette, The Big Snow, added to his rapidly growing posthumous reputation; Jesse Stuart's Men of the Mountain spoke for the Kentucky highlands and People of the Valley, by Frank Waters, for the Sangre de Cristo mountain region of the Southwest; Always the Land, by the poet Paul Engle, took in the countryside around Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Salt of the Earth, by Victor Holmes, showed how a mid-west country weekly can be a cultural center. A posthumous volume of short stories of poetic beauty, Not by Strange Gods, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, came from the heart of Kentucky. Phil Stong's native humor enlivened The Princess, whose scene is Iowa; the hero of Fannie Cook's Boot-Heel Doctor fought against poverty and ignorance in Southeast Missouri. The South was represented by Vereen Bell's Swamp Water, a novel of the Okeefinokee region; Julian Lee Rayford's Cottonmouth, in Mobile, Alabama; James Street's In My Father's House, in Mississippi farming country, and Henry Harrison Kroll's The Usurper in the Mississippi Delta. Texas was represented by two novels of oil-boom towns, Quincie Bolliver, by Mary King, and Thunder in the Earth, by Edwin Lanham, and by Elizabeth Lee Wheaton's robust novel of Texas Negro life, Mr. George's Joint, which won the Thomas Jefferson Prize. A horse ranch in Wyoming was the scene of a marked success in the year's fiction, My Friend Flicka, by Mary O'Hara, which showed as sensitive a response to problems of boy nature as to those of horse-raising. This year saw the touching little fantasy, Robert Nathan's Tapiola's Brave Regiment almost having the field to itself.

Historical Fiction.

When the year began, Kenneth Roberts' Oliver Wiswell was at the top of the poll of public opinion in historical fiction; the same subject from another angle, the American Revolution, was broadly and energetically developed in Frank O. Hough's The Neutral Ground, the conflict years in Westchester County, N. Y. Willa Cather returned to the South for a study of obscure yet potent jealousy in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which takes place in the fifties; this was one of the outstanding novels of the year. East by Day, by Blair Niles, is based on the Amistad case, when a clipper-ship mysteriously put in at Montauk a hundred years ago. Saratoga Trunk, by Edna Ferber, brought back the buccaneering spirit and dash of New Orleans and Saratoga in the eighties. Louis Bromfield's Wild is the River, gave a colorful picture of New Orleans during the Civil War. The widest sweep of the year in historical fiction was made by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who in Botany Bay succeeded in making no less a subject than the founding of Australia come to life full-sized in a novel.

Captain Paul, by Edward Ellsberg, fictionized the career and courage of John Paul Jones. Josephine Pinckney's Hilton Head gave a memorable picture of life in South Carolina in the seventeenth century. Richard Pryne, by Cyril Hume, followed the career of a secret agent behind the lines in New York City during its occupation by the British, and Mildred Jordan's One Red Rose Forever dealt with the life and love affairs of 'Baron' Stiegel, glassmaker beloved of collectors. Who Fought and Bled, by Ralph Beebe, concerns campaigns against the British at Detroit. Scarlet Petticoat, by Nard Jones, takes place in Pacific Coast country, with its fur trade and the War of 1812; this war is also the period of a popular novel of the year, The Strange Woman, by Ben Ames Williams, and of a stirring romance by the most popular British novelist of the sea, The Captain from Connecticut, by Cecil Scott Forester.

The Texas struggle for independence and the career of Stephen Austin takes Anna Brand's Thunder Before Seven through the Texas-Mexican war of 1829-36. Waters of the Wilderness, by Shirley Seifert, centers in George Rogers Clark, the 'Washington of the West.' Long Meadows, by Minnie Hite Moody, begins in 1705 with the coming of a noble immigrant from Strassburg, and lasts into the Civil War. Pioneer history motivates Clark McMeekin's Reckon with the River, a novel of Kentucky; Morning in the Land, by Jessica Nelson North, Wisconsin from 1840 to 1860; They Came to a River, by Allis McKay, pioneer life on the Columbia; The Giant Joshua by Maurine Whipple, life among pioneering Mormons and Not Without Peril, by Marguerite Allis, in early Connecticut; City of Illusion, by Vardis Fisher, is in the days of the Comstock Lode; The Last Frontier, by Howard Fast, a story of Indian fight and disaster.

The New Guides.

Somewhere between history and present day surveys, come the distinctive contributions to our understanding of our own country made by the various 'series' books for which Rivers of America set so high a standard. The Rivers have gone on flowing this year with The Brandywine, by Henry Seidel Canby; The Charles, by Arthur Bernon Tourtellot; The Kaw, by Floyd Benjamin Streeter; and The Kentucky, by T. D. Clark, and though no two are alike none is negligible in a survey of the United States and its making. Another series rapidly gave us four successive volumes of American Folkways: Desert Country, by Edwin Cobb; Pinon Country, by Haniel Long; Short Grass Country, by Stanley Vestal; and Ozark Country, by Otto Ernest Rayburn, revealing these regions to many Americans to whom they were practically unknown land. State biographies went on with the lively Hawkeyes, Phil Stong's life of Iowa; Tar Heels, by Jonathan Daniels, for North Carolina; Heath Bowman's Hoosier for Indiana, and Harland Hatcher's Buckeye Country, a pageant of Ohio.

A resounding achievement of the year was the completion of the American Guides for all the states, a Writers' Project that may have begun with financial relief for writers in the depression as prime object, and effect on the reader as secondary, but that soon began to show how well something could be done that never had been done before. No one book could cover the United States like a Baedeker, but something as detailed as a similar traveling guide was needed for the army of tourists always on the wheel in America. A book for each state resulted; practice made these steadily improve; in plan and in accomplishment they now form a library in themselves and might indeed be called an encyclopedic library.

History.

So far as the general reader was concerned, current history overshadowed the past. William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary will be remembered as long as this year is; Leland Stowe's No Other Road to Freedom is a classic of war correspondence. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt will remain a landmark book. Poignant timeliness brought to the front Mark J. Gayn's The Fight for the Pacific, Edgar Snow's Battle for Asia, Wilfrid Fleischer's Volcanic Isle, a survey of Japan, and Hallett Abend's Japan Unmasked, by a former Pulitzer prize winner, while a permanent document is the report of Florence Harriman, United States minister to Norway from 1937 to 1940, of the invasion of that country, in Mission to the North. John Gunther's Inside Latin America met the demand for such information about our neighbors to the south, as his earlier works had given for Europe and Asia. Further back of the headlines, highly valuable for understanding our frame of mind toward our own conditions and those of the world, is Recent America, by H. B. Parkes, a thorough-going record of what has happened to us since the turn of the century, and how we took it.

The sensation of the year in the field of American history was Carl Van Doren's Secret History of the American Revolution, an account of the conspiracies of Benedict Arnold and numerous others, drawn from secret service papers of British headquarters in North America, now for the first time examined and made public. Hands Off, by Dexter Perkins, is a timely history of the Monroe Doctrine. The United States, by John D. Hicks, a narrative history in two volumes, gives a well-rounded presentation of the Federal Union and of the American Nation up to the present; the first volume appeared in 1937 and this is now incorporated in the complete work. The United States in World Affairs, by Whitney H. Shepardson and William G. Scroggs, takes the country through the foreign relations of the crowded and turbulent year 1940. The Reluctant Republic, by F. F. Van De Water, is a racy account of Vermont's beginnings. Bernard Brodie's Sea Power in the Machine Age goes from Fulton to the dreadnaught. The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy, by Robert H. Jackson. Attorney General of the United States, a history of the Supreme Court, centers in the New Deal judicial crisis. Free Speech in the United States, by Zechariah Chafee, Jr., brings to date his work on free speech that has been since 1920 the chief authority on the subject.

The outstanding success in Civil War history was Margaret Leech's Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865, a kaleidoscope of events and personages in the capital during the war. This period was also represented by Lincoln on the Eve of '61, by Henry Villard, edited by Harold and Oswald Garrison Villard, a contemporary journalist's day-by-day record making an important footnote to history; Let My People Go, by Henrietta Buckmaster, a history of the Underground Railroad and the Abolition Movement; and The Army of Tennessee, by Stanley Horn, a military history of documentary value. Following this period comes With Custer's Cavalry by Katherine Gibson Fougera. The Gold Rushes, by W. P. Morrell, shows their influence on colonization and industry throughout the world, and a sympathetic presentation of a modest Utopia is made in Marguerite Melcher's The Shaker Adventure.

Frontier extension beyond the Missouri is recorded in Dorothy Gardiner's history, West of the River; Everett Dick's Vanguard of the Frontier gives Rocky Mountain history from the time of the earliest white arrivals; The Longhorns by J. Frank Dobie, gives the annals of the cattle empire. Three family records contribute in a measure to our history: The Astors, by Harvey O'Connor, which considers the family as material for social history; The Vanderbilt Legend, by Wayne Andrews, concerned with how that fortune was made and spent; and The Clarks, by William D. Mangam, dealing with Senator Clark the 'copper king' and his immediate descendants as an American phenomenon. A brilliant sidelight on our idealism was contributed by Dixon Wecter's The Hero in America, a history of hero-worship in this country from Captain John Smith to the rise and dethronement of Lindbergh. The Pulitzer Prize in history for 1940 was won by Marcus Lee Hanson's The Atlantic Migration.

Biography.

What bids fair to become the definitive biography of Poe appeared during the year: Edgar Allen Poe, a life-work of Arthur Hobson Quinn. A generally popular biography with strong historical interest was Crusader in Crinoline by Forrest Wilson, the life and times of Harriet Beecher Stowe. There were few biographies with foreign subjects, but of these two were among the year's best: Catherine of Aragon by Garrett Mattingly, the most balanced, well-rounded life of a queen on whom history turned, and in The Brontës Web of Childhood, Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford made a distinctive and valuable contribution to scholarship. Eugenie by Rita Wellman, succeeds better than any previous life of the Empress of the French in communicating her personal qualities.

In last year's biography, Jonathan Edwards, by Ola Elizabeth Winslow, won the Pulitzer award. Historical biography this year included James Madison: the Virginia Revolutionist, by Irving Brant; Zachary Taylor, Soldier of the Republic, by Holman Hamilton; Robert Dale Owen, by Richard William Leopold; Sir William Phips: Treasure-fisher and Royal Governor, by Alice Lounsberry; Anthony Wayne, by Harry Emerson Wilder, taken as the trouble-shooter of the Revolution; Yankee Star-Gazer, by Robert Elton Berry, the life of the sailor-navigator Nathaniel Bowditch; David Glasgow Farragut, by Charles Lee Lewis; and an account of the career of the southern chief of cavalry, Fightin' Joe Wheeler by John P. Dyer.

Literary biographies of Americans included 2 brief but cogent study of personality and background, Carl Sandburg by Karl Detzer; Frances Winwar's group-biography of Walt Whitman and his contemporaries, American Giant; and an important newspaper history, Joseph Pulitzer and His World, by James Wyman Barrett.

Autobiography.

American autobiography was varied, lively and in general enlightening. There was the expected — and desired — rush of reports from war correspondents of which a few, already noted, passed at once into permanence, and Ambassador Dodd's Diary, in Berlin before the war, will long remain. Pierre Van Paassen's That Day Alone kept level with events. But these belong almost in a special compartment of their own: of autobiographies conforming more closely to type a distinguished and distinctive report was that made by William Alexander Percy, whose Lanterns on the Levee forms a living link with the last of the Old South. Native American, by Ray Stannard Baker, found a welcome waiting for the warmly human story of how 'David Grayson' grew up on the frontier. What's Past is Prologue, by Mary Barnett Gilson, reflects upon industrial experience; Emile Gauvreau's My Last Million Readers displays the adventures and acerbities of tabloid journalism; a sunnier landscape is displayed in H. L. Mencken's autobiographical Newspaper Days. A record rescued from the past and now possessing special interest is The House I Knew, by Elizabeth Neilson, who came from Southern Germany in the early nineties and is the wife of W. A. Neilson, for 20 years President of Smith College. Sylvester Maxwell Lambert's A Yankee Doctor in Paradise is the experience of a physician sent by the Rockefeller Foundation to fight hookworm in islands of the South Seas. Editor in Politics continues the important autobiography of Josephus Daniels, and Hugh Wilson reports on interim activities in Diplomat Between Wars.

The rush of reminiscences by unknown celebrities that reached its height last year subsided before this one was well under way, and only a few like Country Druggist, by Robert B. Nixon Jr., contributed to our minor social history. Bellamy Partridge continued his popular Country Lawyer with an equally appealing Big Family. Father of the Blues, by William C. Handy, edited by Arna Bontemps, added to our literature of contemporary American music. Irvin Cobb's Exit Laughing sustained the reputation of a long-favorite humorist; An Actor's Daughter by Aline Bernstein, fictionized a dramatic period in New York's social life. Flora Cloman, in I'd Live It Over brought the backwoods of Minnesota and other regions into popular consciousness and No Life for a Lady, Agnes Morley Cleaveland's experience in the ranch country of yesterday, was another unusual sidelight on America. As letters often form, quite unconsciously, the best sort of autobiography, it is possible to include in this category one of the most mellow, rewarding correspondences published for a long time: The Holmes-Pollock Letters, edited by M. de Wolfe Howe; these were exchanged between Chief Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock over a period of some sixty years, between 1874 and 1932.

Criticism.

It is seldom that a more ambitious undertaking in criticism is put under way than that of Intellectual America, in which Oscar Cargill begins, in one massive volume to be continued, a personal assessment and evaluation of literature in the United States, of our 'ideas on the march.' A critical estimate of modern fiction was made by Elizabeth Monroe in The Novel and Society, and in The Intent of the Critic a symposium of practitioners was conducted by Donald A. Stauffer. The first American biography of Jules Verne, by Kenneth Allot, must be included also in literary criticism, and one of the most thoroughgoing pieces of workmanship of the year was a history of the detective story from Poe to the present, Howard Haycraft's Murder for Pleasure, which seems to leave out nothing. The most noteworthy of the single studies was Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow, seven important essays including new light on Dickens, and though The Opinions of Oliver Allston, by Van Wyck Brooks, are disguised, this singularly attractive work has so much to do with the literary opinions of Mr. Brooks that it could not be left out of this classification. In literary history we had The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Whitman and Emerson by F. O. Matthiessen, and American Journalism, a basic history by Frank L. Mott.

Poetry and Drama.

Anthologies and collected verse were more conspicuous this year than single volumes by new or well-known poets. The Listening Landscape by Marya Zaturenska, who won the Pulitzer prize in 1938; Special Laughter by Howard Nutt; Conrad Aiken's And in the Human Heart; James Gould Fletcher's South Star; the collected Poems: 1830-1840, of Horace Gregory; collected poems of William Carlos Williams in The Broken Span; J. G. Neihardt's The Song of Jed Smith; Mark Van Doren's narrative The Mayfield Deer; the Collected Poems of Lew Sarett; and the longest autobiography in verse yet produced in America, William Rose Benét's The Dust Which is God, stood out in the year's poetry. The Pulitzer 1940 prize in this department went to Sunderland Capture by Leonard Bacon. New Poets for Old by Henry W. Wells, a study in literary genetics, was one of the very few books about poetry.

The Pulitzer prize play of the year, There Shall be no Night, by Robert Sherwood, continued in favor not only on the stage through this year, but also in its printed form. Other stage successes appearing in print included My Sister Eileen dramatized from Ruth McKenny's stories by Fields and Chodorov; Rose Franken's Claudia; George Washington Slept Here, by Hart and Kaufman; Lillian Hellman's refugee drama Watch on the Rhine; the hilarious shocker Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring; Lawrence Langner's Susanna and the Elders; Christopher Morley's cheerful satire in Greek dress, The Trojan Horse; and three plays by William Saroyan, The Beautiful People, Sweeney in the Trees and Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning. The Dramatic Imagination, by the famous stage designer Robert Edmond Jones, was one of the few important books about the stage; another Pageant of the Theatre by Edmund Fuller is a world history for the general reader.