1942: Literature, American

Biographies; War Diaries.

Biography well may lead the way in a summary of American literature for 1942, for the year was scarcely well under way before Samuel Eliot Morison's Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a life of Columbus, gave our history as a continent a point of departure with a book that stands, and will undoubtedly remain, at the head of all lives of the great discoverer. The Pulitzer prize for biography of the preceding year went in 1942 to Forrest Wilson's Crusader in Crinoline, a life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Taking historic figures in approximately chronological order, we had in 1942 Esther Forbes's sparkling Paul Revere and the World He Lived In; a much-needed all-round biography of Thomas Jefferson, by Saul Padover; Charles Cunningham's Timothy Dwight, a life of the New England patriot and educational leader; Janet Whitney's study of John Woolman, American Quaker, friend of Indians and foe of slavery; the life of a great citizen of Charles Town, Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, by Richard Barry; Francis Parkman: Heroic Historian, by Mason Wade; the best biography so far of Margaret Fuller, by Margaret Stern; Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy, by Elting E. Morison; Angel in Top Hat, by Zulma Steele, bringing out the courage and eccentricities of Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Josiah Willard Gibbs: American Genius, by Muriel Rukeyser, weighing the value of his work in thermodynamics; and Mr. Justice Holmes, a personal record by Francis Biddle.

The Civil War period, to which our writers in general this year paid particular attention, was represented by a sound study of the character of Grant of Appomattox, by William E. Brooks; Lee's Lieutenants, continuing Douglas Freeman's historical biographies From Manassas to Malvern Hill; Pemberton, Defender of Vicksburg, by J. C. Pemberton; and Morgan and His Raiders, by Cecil Fletcher Holland. Indian fighting came in with Stanley Vestal's Bigfoot Wallace, the Texan scout. Oliver Carlson, biographer of journalists, turned his attention to James Gordon Bennett as The Man Who Made News; the autobiography of Sun Chief revealed a Hopi Indian caught between two cultures; Rackham Holt's George Washington Carver portrayed the career of the world-famous Negro scientist, born in slavery, who kept up his beneficent work to almost the day of his death, which took place not long after the appearance of this book. Zora Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, the autobiographical report of the career of a gifted Negro writer; Mackinlay Hayes's story of the tenor Roland Hayes in Angel Mo' and Her Son, added to the steadily growing literature of Negro achievement, in which may also be placed J. Saunders Redding's thoughtful No Day of Triumph and a volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, For My People, by Margaret Walker, especially interesting for its experiments in rhythmical expression.

The impulse to unburden the soul with books about life with father, having broken out in the last few years all over the map, has at last begun to die down, possibly because most of the paternal trades and professions have been represented, and personal psychological adjustments of journalists have lost favor in comparison with reports of newspapermen who write objectively about the war. W. H. White's They Were Expendable, a report from Bataan, bids fair to keep alive for a long time in our literature, and Last Train from Berlin, by Howard K. Smith, carried on the interest aroused by W. L. Shirer's Berlin Diary of last year. Experiences such as those recounted in The Raft, by Robert Trumbull, and Queen of the Flat-Tops, by Stanley Johnston, only correspondent with the aircraft carrier Lexington, were read far more eagerly, and with far better reason, than fictional thrillers; and personal reports such as that of the American Ambassador Joseph E. Davies in Mission to Moscow, or Ambassador Grew's Report on Tokyo, made publishing records, the latter in a paper-covered edition to meet necessity with proper swiftness. There was also warm appreciation of Eliot Paul's The Last Time I Saw Paris, which was all the more effective for its purpose by its strongly personal tone. Thomas Ybarra continued Young Man of Caracas with Young Man of the World; Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs appeared, and Will Irwin's The Making of a Reporter, and Julian Green's Memories of Happy Days called back the lost Paris where this American author spent so much of his life.

There were as few biographies of historical characters overseas as might be expected from our present preoccupation with our own past as well as our own people, but this gap was filled with one large volume, the brilliant, quite unclassifiable Van Loon's Lives, in which Hendrik Willem Van Loon put Plutarch in the shade by calling up the ghosts of an entirely different set of historic characters.

Regional Literature.

A new category in our literature has been established within recent years, made up of books that interpret, to ourselves and possibly to the world at large, distinguishing characteristics of states, river countries, cities, or distinctive regions forming part of the wide and varied American scene. Starting with the firm and continued success of the Rivers of America series — a success notable not only for its high general level of excellence but by the enthusiasm with which it has been demanded, not counting the unique American Guides of the WPA, which have now rounded up all the states and gone into our reference libraries, we have an American Folkways series to which the year's additions included Blue Ridge Country, a mountaineer region described by Jean Thomas; the frontier High Border Country, by Eric Thane; Mormon Country, by Waldo Stegner; and Palmetto Country, by Stetson Kennedy. The series about American ports was continued by Harold Sinclair's the Port of New Orleans and by Stephen Leacock's Montreal: Seaport and City, past and present of the fifth largest seaport in the world. The Rivers of America series rolled on with Lower Mississippi, by Hodding Carter; The Chicago, by Harry Hansen; The St. Lawrence, by Henry Beston; The Wisconsin, by August Derleth; The Alleghany, by Frederick Way; The Kentucky, by Thomas D. Clark; and The Sangamon, by Edgar Lee Masters. As to the states, they were especially well represented by separate studies such as Georgia, Unfinished State, by Hal Steed; Independent Vermont, by Charles Miner Thompson; Eastern Shore, Hulbert Footner's book about Maryland; Weep No More, My Lady, Alvin F. Harlow's book about Kentucky; Virginia Moore's Virginia is a State of Mind; Richard G. Lillard's Nevada in Desert Challenge; and George Sessons Perry's Texas, a World in Itself. Wide and varied country came under consideration in The Roaring Land, Archie Binns's book about the Great Northwest; The Long Ships Passing, Walter Havighurst's book about the Great Lakes; Karl Bickel's Mangrove Coast, the west coast of Florida, and several reports on the changed, changing or changeless South, from Virginius Dabney's inquiry into changes in Below the Potomac, Sam Byrd's Small Town South, and Ben Robertson's Red Hills and Cotton, to Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's stories of remote Cross Creek, the Florida country of her Yearling. From the central ganglion of American life came two outstanding reports, and up-to-the-minute survey in G. M. Kiplinger's Washington is Like That, and Marquis Child's I Write from Washington, which went deeper. Summing up the nation from the standpoint of an ethnologist, but expressing its findings with humor and cogency that endeared it to the general public, Margaret Mead's And Keep Your Powder Dry will no doubt be consulted in the future as a record of the American mind at the outset of war.

History.

The Pulitzer award of 1942 to a distinguished book of the year on the history of the United States went to Margaret Leech's Reveillé in Washington, a choice heartily seconded by readers throughout the country. Avery O. Craven's The Coming of the Civil War sought to clarify the issues of that great conflict; Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column, by George Fort Milton, showed that different views are no modern phenomenon, and The Hidden Civil War, by Wood Gray, reviewed the Copperhead movement from 1860 to the end of the Civil War in a scholarly treatment of a subject hitherto relatively neglected. Carl Sandburg's Storm Over the Land, his own one-volume version of Abraham Lincoln: the War Years, far from losing by condensation, took on power of its own especially needed at a time when the general public begins to realize that the War Between the States was the trial ground, not only of modern warfare, but of issues now at stake in global war. Thus the best one-volume narrative history of the United States that can also be used for reference, Nevins and Commager's America: the Story of a Free People, has just as many pages after as before the chapter in which campaigns of the Civil War are outlined. The American Spirit, by Charles and Mary Beard, continues the sequence of historic works opening in 1929 with The Rise of American Civilization, and an enlarged, revised edition of the masterly Growth of the American Republic, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, was published this year, now including exploration and Colonial periods. Among studies of special periods, Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh's Rebels and Gentlemen showed the Philadelphia of Franklin. About the only contribution by Americans to study of the past in lands other than our own was made by Norman Cousins's The Good Inheritance, a story of the struggle of Athens for survival as a democracy, intended to set forth its contribution to our own struggle in the present fight for democratic values. Herbert Agar's A Time for Greatness might be called a work of history in the making as it demands that we recognize and realize the crucial importance of this day and of our conduct in it.

Historical Fiction.

There was a predominance of fiction with scenes in the past, over that in which action was laid in the America of today, but minor novelists seem to have stopped work for the moment on the construction of that highway of historical fiction, composed of long and often tedious narratives that if laid chronologically end to end would stretch with few breaks from our founding to our future. We had instead several novels that illuminate great periods: Howard Fast's The Unvanquished, a vision of Valley Forge, Washington himself, and the spirit that brought us through those years; Philip Van Doren Stern's Drums of Morning, a needed view of the abolition movement. Branch Cabell went back to the Spanish occupation of Florida for a 'comedy of conquest,' The First American Gentleman, a prince of what is now Virginia who was made a grandee of Spain. One of the year's most popular novels, Lloyd Douglas's The Robe, gives a reverent, unconventional presentation of the life of Jesus as reported to a Roman who saw him only on two historic occasions. Arthur Meeker went to seventeenth-century French court life for his Dumaesque The Ivory Mischief; Babette Deutsch's Rogue's Legacy is a fictionized life of Villon; Ludwig Lewisohn's Renegade takes place in eighteenth-century Paris; the central figure of Herbert Gorman's Brave General is Boulanger; while Anne Green's Lady in the Mask is in the time of Leonardo and Irina Skariatina's Tamara in Imperial Russia. Otherwise our historical novelists found material at home: Le Grand Cannon's much-admired Look to the Mountain, in New Hampshire before the Revolution; Nathan Schachner's King's Messenger in Bacon's Rebellion; Elsie Singmaster's High Wind Rising among Pennsylvania Germans in the French and Indian War; Willard Wiener's Morning in America, in the Revolution, with Charles Lee; Agnes Sligh Turnbull's The Day Must Dawn in pioneer Pennsylvania life as women found it; Inglis Fletcher's Men of Albemarle in eighteenth-century North Carolina; Burke Boyce's Perilous Night in upstate New York during the Revolution; Carl Carmer's Genesee Fever in strange true stories of the same region; Virginia Sorenson's Little Lower Than the Angels in the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo; Beyond Surrender, by Marion Sims, in the days of Reconstruction; Henry Bellaman's Floods of Spring in nineteenth-century Missouri; Ruth Suckow's New Hope in Iowa at the turn of the century. Though Sally Benson's buoyant Meet Me in St. Louis goes no further back than the period of that famous Fair, and in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay the personal experiences of Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough recount a trip to Europe in the 1920's, they tell of a world that is gone, the latter in so ebullient a spirit that it closed the year as the best-selling work of non-fiction in America, ousting from that position a humorous report of camp life, Marion Hargrove's See Here, Private Hargrove, that had held this place for months.

Contemporary Literature.

It seems as yet too early for our fiction in general to reflect American reaction to actual war: our novels, until the close of the year, came scarcely nearer to it than did the Pulitzer Prize winner of 1942, Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life, which mirrored the state of mind before the issue was met. John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down showed an occupied village, presumably in Norway, stoutly and nobling resisting tyranny. Erskine Caldwell's All Night Long came from war in Russia; Pearl Buck's Dragon Seed from the effect of the Japanese war on farmers in China; Grace Zaring Stone, keeping the pseudonym under which she wrote last year's thriller, Escape, but permitting the secret to become public, this year wrote a story of Brittany during Nazi occupation, Reprisal. Clark McMeekin's lively Welcome, Soldier showed a camp in 1918 and in 1941. Josephine Lawrence continued her fictional case-histories of contemporary life by facing the problem of war marriage and working it out in There is Today. The Valley of Decision, Marcia Davenport's successful novel, began with the panic of 1873 and carried the fortunes of a steel magnate's family to the edge of Pearl Harbor. An impressive publishing prize for the year went to Ellen Proctor's Turning Leaves, a novel about a Minnesota family. Nancy Hale's The Prodigal Women, beginning in the youth of heroines from the North and the South, took them through the period when women thought they were freeing themselves from the disadvantages of convention. The Just and the Unjust, by James Gould Cozzens, made a long detailed presentation of lawyers and the law, Quicksilver, by Fitzroy Davis, showed the American theater at home and on the road, Nobody's Children, by Rose Kuszmaul, the little world of an orphanage. The last novel of the greatly mourned Rachel Field, And So To-Morrow, was a quiet love story complicated by social barriers set up in a New England mill town. Toward the end of the year came Christopher Morley's warm-hearted Thorofare, taking place in England and in America, and qualifying as one of the most sympathetic and effective interpretations of each country to the other.

Alice Tisdale Hobart's The Cup and the Sword is in the California wine-growing country, Mary Medearis's Big Doc's Girl, in backwoods Arkansas, Marie Campbell's Cloud Walking, in the Kentucky mountains. Cousin William, coming out just after the death of Della Lutes, closed a series of generally treasured regional novels, and Come Back to Wayne County, a posthumous novel by Jake Falstaff (H. Fetzer), preserved his memory. Albert Halper's The Little People concerned the personnel of a Chicago clothing store, Apple in the Attic, by Mildred Jordan was about Pennsylvania German farmers. Just before the year ended we had in Phil Stong's One Destiny, a stirring study of an Iowa town, not long out of the depression, pulling itself together in spontaneous and energetic war effort, and in Mackinlay Kantor's Happy Land a fantasy in which an old man who long ago gave his life for America returns to comfort a father whose son has just given his young life.

However, American writers did rise at once to the occasion: they mobilized to the aid of the country almost as soon as the troops, in the periodical press and in Government publications often of striking merit. John Steinbeck's Bombers Away, for instance, written for the Army Air Forces and almost an Army manual, will surely enter the canon of Steinbeck's works.

Criticism.

Of criticism of the arts and of literature there was relatively little, but even in a year rich in this respect Alfred Kazin's fresh view of American prose literature, On Native Grounds, sound in its evaluations and admirably balanced, would have taken first place. We had also a posthumous work of Constance Rourke, The Roots of American Culture, brought to publication by Van Wyck Brooks; a noteworthy study of Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, by Theodor Spencer; a provocative study of The Emergence of an American Art, by Jerome Mellquist; and a survey of twentieth century primitives in They Taught Themselves, by Sidney Janis. R. P. Tristram Coffin wrote on The Substance of Poetry, Albert Guerard, Jr., on Robert Bridges: A Study of Traditionalism, and Katherine Garrison Chapin's volume of poems, Plain Chant for America included an essay on the theory of poetry.

Poetry.

The Pulitzer poetry prize for 1942 went to William Rose Benét for his book-length, autobiographical The Dust Which Is God and in 1942 The Selected Works of Stephan Vincent Benét appeared in two volumes. Edna St. Vincent Millay commemorated the German extermination of a Czechoslovakian village in the burning verse of Murder of Lidice; Robert Nathan, in Dunkirk: A Ballad, told the story of one of the little boats that took part in the evacuation; Mark Van Doren published Our Lady of Peace and Other War Poems. Robert Frost brought out his first volume of verse in six years, The Witness Tree, which was generally acclaimed as at the height of his power. Robinson Jeffer's narrative and shorter poems Be Angry at the Sun; Paul Engle's West of Midnight; the imaginative Dark Kingdom of Kenneth Pacchen; Arthur Davison Ficke's sonnets in Tumultuous Shore; Proud Riders, narrative verse by the novelist Harold Davis, the outdoor poems of R. P. T. Coffin's There Will be Bread and Love; the Afro-American light verse of Langston Hughes's Shakespeare in Harlem; Wallace Stevens's Parts of a World; Genevieve Taggard's Long View; George Zabriskie's The Mind's Geography; and Elizabeth's Coatsworth's Country Poems, stand out for various reasons in a poetic year that taken by and large was more noticeable for numbers than for gifts.

Drama.

From the standpoint of stage production, the year was not much of an improvement over 1941, when the Pulitzer drama prize was not awarded at all. But the publication of plays went on at much the same rate, carrying the influence of the theater to regions where moving pictures reigned. Two collections of stage hits were popular in print, the 'Five Plays' of Lillian Hellman, including Children's Hour, Days to Come, The Little Foxes, and Watch on the Rhine; and Six Plays, by Kaufman and Hart, including You Can't Take It With You, which in 1937 won the Pulitzer prize, and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Two annuals on which the theatrical historian of the future relies, came as usual: the 'Best Plays' and year book of the stage, edited by Burns Mantle, and Margaret Mayorga's 'Best One Act Plays.' The Dallas Little Theater proved its quality by Three Southwest Plays: Sam Acheson's We Are Besieged, Katherine Witherspoon's Jute, and John William Rogers's Where the Dear Antelope Play. Chodorov and Fields's dramatic versions of two popular pieces of humorous fiction were printed: Junior Miss and My Sister Eileen, and so was Kaufman and Ferber's The Land Is Bright.

Of what might be called the literary theater the most distinguished examples in print were Steinbeck's The Moon is Down as a play in two parts; the brilliant collection of short plays by William Saroyan, Razzle Dazzle; Clifford Odet's Clash by Night; Maxwell Anderson's Eve of St. Mark; and two verse plays: Destroyers, by Archibald Fleming, on an Arthurian theme, and Selden Rodman's drama of Haiti in 1791, The Revolutionists, following The Airmen in a projected trilogy.