1942: Literature, English

The crucial fact to be borne in mind in reviewing books published in Britain in 1941-42 is that in this period 20,000,000 books were destroyed by enemy action, over 5,000,000 in a single night in the burning of Paternoster Row. This was followed by an unprecedented paper shortage, and by an even greater scarcity of all binding materials and of labor for this purpose. All this was in the face of tremendously increased demand and need for books, due to destruction not only of publishers' stocks and great public collections, but of thousands of cherished home libraries, to calls for shelter-reading, and to the creation of countless new readers by the strong interest taken by every class of society in war aims and plans for the future.

For a book to survive such pressure and win through into print in England, the definition of a 'good book' had to take on the new meaning of a book provably 'good for' something so needed that for its sake readers would gladly forego amenities of production and put up, under Authorized Economy Standards, with narrow margins, poor grayish paper, and a typographic scheme whose one concern was legibility. These conditions of publication are described in what may rank as a historical document, John Brophy's Britain Needs Books (National Book Council). Not until these conditions are realized in America will the appearance here of books printed in Britain in 1941-42 arouse the sense of glory to which they are entitled, for each line, page and picture means difficulties apparently insurmountable, and devotion by which they were surmounted.

In normal times it was possible for an American in his own country to inspect all the more important British books of the year with no more trouble than finding a large modern bookstore. He could be fairly certain of obtaining the best of these books in American editions, whether or not the author had an established reputation; and in the section of the shop devoted to imported books he could himself decide on the merits of new works that had made some impression in England without finding a large American market.

To-day the situation has been radically changed. British authors whose works sold well in America before 1939 are still sure of their American market; but a new writer, especially one who has something new to say in a new literary genre, may remain completely unknown on this side — not in the relative sense that his or her book had failed to find an American publisher and so missed the chance of being reviewed, but in the absolute and literal sense of the word 'unknown,' which can be used only when the most diligent search fails to bring a single imported copy to light. Thus Inez Holden, creating almost a new technique of narrative in her Night Shift (John Lane, 1942), to record a psychological situation with which men of letters have never before had to deal, could remain so unknown on this side that the very title of her book could be unconsciously appropriated by an American best-seller. Gwynne-Browne's F. S. P. (Chatto, 1942) has significance in the history of English prose style; if conventional English cannot put the reader through the experience of waiting on Dunkerque's beaches, it is all to the good to find a non-professional doing the job effectively under the stylistic influence of Gertrude Stein. But F. S. P. remains unknown in America. British writers of light verse have been placing major lyric poets in the embarrassing position of seeming to write 'heavy' verse — too heavy to rise to the obvious emotional challenge of the blitz; the woman whose pen name is 'Sagittarius' presented the most vivid account in literature of the hair-breadth saving of St. Paul's, with all the emotional condensation of rhymed verse, yet her London Watches is unobtainable in America and already out of print — due to instant demand — in Britain.

Fiction.

Fiction by established authors naturally and largely appeared in American editions. Thus we had Frank Swinnerton's Thankless Child, a study in family relations; G. B. Stern's Rakonitz continuation, The Young Matriarch; Sheila Kaye-Smith's The Secret Son; H. G. Wells's satiric You Can't Be Too Careful; Phyllis Bottome's picture of courage in London Pride and Margery Allingham's in The Oaken Heart; Margaret Kennedy's intimate record of British spirit in Where Stands a Winged Sentry, we had Somerset Maugham's Hour before Dawn, V. Sackville West's Grand Canyon; Humphrey Pakington's Our Aunt Auda; Storm Jameson's Then We Shall Hear Singing; J. B. Priestley's Blackout in Gretly; Ann Bridge's Frontier Passage, which came to audiences ready prepared. Eric Knight's Sam Small Flies Again carried along a popular figure to readers of The Flying Yorkshireman — to whom his death early in 1943, in a plane on duty, came as a personal blow. Doris Leslie's House in the Dust had an American edition, bringing us the story of a mansion bombed in the blitz; so did Edith Pargeter's People of My Own, a family between the two great wars; Anne Meredith's House of the Heart, with a family living in this house for nine generations; and England past and present in Norman Collins's The Quiet Lady. Ernest Raymond's The Last to Rest is a quiet, convincing study of the transformation of simple citizens into heroes, and Elizabeth Goudge's Castle on the Hill dealing with a group of uprooted Britons demonstrated British values that stand firm. The invincible gayety of Angela Thirkell's Northbridge Rectory and Merling Hall heightened the stoic attitude of her country gentry to air attacks; Nevil Shute's Pied Piper dealt delicately with refugee children; Seven for Cornelia, by Catherine MacDonald MacLean, with children evacuated to the Scottish Highlands; and James Ronalds's Old Soldiers Never Die with the situation of the over-age military man. A first novel, James Aldridge's Signed with Their Honour, flashed out of an airman's experience, and from an airman came the fine Falling through Space, by Richard Hillary, whose death on duty ended a promising career.

History and Biography.

Historical novels reached us from England in the usual proportion, the leader being Margaret Irwin's Bothwell romance, The Gay Galliard. Biography included Philip Guedalla's Mr. Churchill, Grant Richards's Housman, Hilaire Belloc's Elizabeth, A. E. W. Mason's Francis Drake, Patricia Strauss's Cripps, Hesketh Pearson's G. B. S., Mrs. Belloc Lowndes's memoir of her mother which was also a historic document of the Franco-Prussian War, I Too Have Lived in Arcadia, and a composite biography by William Gaunt, The Preraphaelite Tragedy. The posthumous essays of Virginia Woolf, Death of the Moth thus reached us, and G. N. M. Trevelyan's English Social History made history of its own in America.

Books Across the Sea.

There remained, however, highly important books that would under peacetime conditions have been imported to meet demands that though relatively smaller, were strong, continued and coming from readers of keen intelligence. These, due to currency restrictions and other conditions prohibitory to importing booksellers, seemed lost altogether to all American readers save such as kept standing accounts with booksellers overseas. This situation was met in 1941-42 by a society unique among organizations for international goodwill: 'Books Across the Sea,' with headquarters in America at the English Speaking Union, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, and in England at Aldwych House, London. By sending to the America Reading Room of this society in London, as individual gifts, 'ambassador books' about America published since war began and deemed by a jury of selection to be worth precious cargo space in interpreting American conditions, ideals and background to an eager British audience, this circle established a collection, widely used throughout England, numbering 1,000 volumes by the close of 1942 and reinforced by a large collection of government publications given by the Library of Congress. A reciprocal gift of books similarly interpreting present-day England, chosen by distinguished authorities, is now housed at the New York reading room of 'Books Across the Sea.' Through this exchange, many Americans have thus been able to examine, in single copies otherwise inaccessible in this country, books of the highest value to all who belong, as readers, to the common realm of the English language.

Poetry.

It answers the question 'Is any poetry coming now from Britain?' with the rush of verse, keeping a surprisingly high level, from the armed forces, especially the R.A.F., in such volumes as Poems from the Forces (Routledge), Dispersal Point, by John Pudney (Bodley Head), the anthology Poems of This War, and Alun Lewis's Raider's Dawn, the last two later brought out in the United States. Wilfred Gibson's Challenge represented older poets, with John Masefield's Land Workers. The younger generation gave us the fervor and fire of Rostrevor Hamilton's Apollyon (Heinemann), and the rural gayety of Ruth Pitter's The Rude Potato, while Gordon Boshell's My Pen My Sword represented the influence on morale of honest newspaper verse.

Personal Tales.

Among personal experiences preserved in this collection are Basil Woon's Hell Came to London (Davies), Reginald Foster's Dover Front (Secker), H. A. Wilson's Death Over Haggerston (Mowbray), Hilda Marchant's Women and Children Last (Gollancz), Michael Wassey's Ordeal by Fire (Secker), George Sava's They Stayed in London (Faber), The Bells Go Down, diary of an Auxiliary Fire Service man (Methuen), and Peter de Polnay's Death and Tomorrow (Secker), most vivid report yet given of France under German occupation. Among the novels are John Brown's Body, Gordon Boshell's study of an average Englishman in war (Secker), Mrs. Morel, by Marjorie Hessell Tiltman (Hodder), showing the new England being shaped on the anvil of war; Ramping Cat, by Christopher Mawson an experiment in historical fiction placing, as it were, Henry VIII and Katherine Howard in modern dress; and two war novels by Robert Graves, The Avengers and The Thin Blue Line (Hutchinson). History Under Fire (Batsford) preserved a noble record, in photographs and text by James Pope-Hennessey, of architectural beauty destroyed by the blitz, a record continued by The Bombed Buildings of Britain (Architectural Press), also available here.

Post-War Problems.

A new literature is rising from an equalitarian England; it appears in such soldier stories as those of Gerald Kersh, They Die with Their Boots Clean and Nine Lives of Bill Nelson (Heinemann); in sea stories such as My Name Is Frank and Log Book by the merchant seaman Frank Laskier, and by the most moving of all, Went the Day Well (Harrap), in which 28 famous writers speak for 28 men and women of all ranks and classes, known to them, who held in common an eagerness to live and a gladness to die for the new world in process of becoming.

A feature of British war books always to be considered is the stress placed upon postwar planning of all kinds, from Conditions of Peace, by Edward Hallett Carr, first Ambassador Book to cross for 'Books Across the Sea' and later published here, to the report of the Archbishop of Canterbury (Penguin Books), the Beveridge Report, the symposium When we Build Again (Allen), and the beautifully illustrated triumph of cheap production, Living in Cities, by Ralph Tubbs (Penguin Books), whose first edition was made possible by using the central core of a charred block of plate paper that had gone through the Great Fire of London. In general, the pamphlet has in England come into its own, and is regarded with the respect due to its contents, even if they are not between board covers. It should be added to this brief summary that in the literature of a land at war the humor, pictorial and otherwise, of Fougasse, Osbert Lancaster, Pomt, Sillice, and the never-failing Low, remains in testimony to the spirit that made the common people mighty to endure. This courage was immortalized in the best-selling book in England reaching indeed astronomical figures — the magnificently illustrated publication Front Line, telling what went on in the Battle of Britain when the front line reached the back yard.

1942: Literature, Children's

Spring Prize-Winners.

Publishing for children no longer begins, as in former years, just early enough in autumn to create a literary log-jam before Christmas, but opens almost as soon as the year itself, continues steadily month by month, and rises first to the peak of the Children's Spring Book Festival in May, and then in November to the plateau of Children's Book Week. On the former occasion, annually sponsored by the New York Herald-Tribune, three prizes, awarded by well-known authorities on juvenile literature, are made to the best spring publication in each of three classifications of age: older young folks, children under twelve, and little folks of picture-book age. The prize in the first category was won by a romance of the Sea Beggars, None But the Brave, by Rosamond Van der Zee Marshall, whose vigorous account of the resistance of the Dutch to Spanish aggressors at the time of the Siege of Leyden had direct bearing upon contemporary underground patriotism in Europe. The honor books chosen by the judges in this class were Christine Noble Govan's Carolina Caravan, story of an orphaned family whose lack of money did not hamper appreciation of life; Street of Ships, by Charles M. Dougherty, around New York's harbor in clipper ship days; They Loved to Laugh, by Kathryn Worth, a Quaker family teaching a sensitive girl to give and take jokes; and War Horse, by Fairfax Downey, a story of the first World War whose pictures were drawn by Paul Brown. The prize book for the middle group was a story-biography of John Paul Jones, 'I Have Just Begun to Fight!', by Commander Edward Ellsberg — absent, like many of the year's writers of juveniles, on duty with the armed forces. The honor books included a tale of medieval life in England, Adam of the Road, by Elizabeth Janet Grey; a collection of Mexican folk tales, The Boy Who Could Do Everything, told by Anita Brenner and given distinctive decorations by Jean Charlot; Lions on the Hunt, by Theodore Waldeck, a realistic account of life on the African veldt; and Steppin and Family, by Hope Newell, Harlem as the home of a Negro boy with a gift for step-dancing. The picture-book prize was won by Mr. Tootwhistle's Invention, words and-colored pictures by Peter Wells, a jolly extravaganza on railroad history. The honor books in this class were John Hooper's Johnny Jump-Up, a young driver bringing through a team from Bucksport to Castine, Me.; Whitey's First Round-Up, by Glen Rounds, one of a group of successful experiments in low-cost production; Dudley Henry Morris's The Truck That Flew, which later was made into a movie; and Frances Neilson's The Donkey from Dorking, pictures by Lydia Vitale and Janet Hopkins, a merry costermonger story that though by an American was so true to life and local color that later in the year it was highly popular in an English edition.

Medal-Winners.

The Newbery Medal awarded in 1942 for the best children's book of the preceding year went to a story of frontier Indian raids, truly a thriller: The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds, with fine colored pictures by Paul Lantz. The same author and artist scored in 1942 with Tom Whipple, retold version of an early American 'success story,' with large color lithographs in the manner of the period. The Caldecott Prize awarded in 1942 for the best picture-book of 1941 went to Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, whose large lithograph drawings have a Boston background. The Julia Ellsworth Ford Foundation's annual award went to a pioneer story, Journey Cake, by Isabel McLennan McMeekin, well-known among writers of adult fiction as one of the team writing under the pseudonym of Clark McMeekin; the drawings were by Nicholas Panesis.

War Books for Little Children.

It was soon clear that on the subject of war as affecting children's books there would be a cleavage naturally to be expected at the outset of our preparations, and coming, on both sides, from deep and sympathetic concern with the welfare of children. On one side were those) who held that war should not enter at all into books for children, which they held should preserve for them a world apart from present conditions. On the other were those who believed that with the human race involved in global war and children part of the human race, it would be as easy to keep them out of war as out of the solar system. Children themselves, if their favorite games meant anything, seemed to side with the latter. Even little children welcomed Munro Leaf's amusing but thoroughly practical Wartime Handbook for Young Americans, found in Hortense Flexner's The Wishing Window enlightenment without terror on what happened to some other little children in France, and in Alice Dalgliesh's Gulliver-Joins the Army, recognized their own adjustments to war conditions in a typical suburb. It is now greatly to the advantage both of our children and of their books that so many of our authors take into account the lucidity of mind in early years, later confused by the rush of new experiences, that makes it possible for young children to take in, without reasoning, abstract ideas of the utmost importance to their latter development. Thus The Secret of the Ancient Oak, by the artist-author known as Wolo, expressed basic values for which we fight, in terms of little forest animals defending their tree. But the finest example of confidence that the vibrations of pure patriotism can reach even six-year-olds if they come directly to the eye and ear, was in the handsomest picture-book of the year, The Star-Spangled Banner, large colored lithographs by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, interpreting the stanzas of our national anthem.

Picture-Books.

For the most part, the share of picture-books in our war effort was in strengthening home ties and a sense of the value of the way of life we defend. Jesus' Story, color plates by Maud and Miska Petersham, adapted to words from the New Testament, was one of the fall's most popular picture-books, and those prepared especially for Christmas this year were well aware of its significance as a religious festival; in Ferencz Molnar's touching fantasy, The Blue Eyed Lady, there were even real angels. Animal books, always appealing to a little child's protective sympathies, gave him this year, in Clare Turlay Newberry's Marshmallow, the alliance of a rabbit and a disconcerted middle-aged cat; Margot Austin's Gabriel Churchkitten and Pancho and the Bull with the Crooked Tail, by Berta and Elmer Hader were disarmingly funny; Dash and Dart, by Conrad and Mary Buff, with lithographs and lyric prose, brought children into the forest's heart and the life of two fawns. The Animal Book by Dorothy and Nils Hogner and At the Seashore by W. W. and Irene Robinson had lively and reliable color plates. Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House made gay pictures of a changing neighborhood, and her illustrations for The Fast-Sooner Hound by Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, heighted a merry folk-tale. One of the major events of the year was the publication of Walter de la Mare's poems Bells and Grass, while his story, Mr. Bumps and His Monkey, with colored lithographs by Dorothy Lathrop, went deeper into the meaning of human life than any other tale of which an animal was the hero.

War Books for Young Folks.

There were, however, plenty of books in which war, somewhere in the world today, entered the picture. The most striking was among those for older boys; John R. Tunis's All-American, a school-sport story of the best type, faced squarely up to vital issues of race discrimination that American youth must face now and in a postwar world. Marie McSwigan's Snow Treasure showed children helping to keep up resistance in Norway, and Sigrid Undset's Happy Days in Norway, though describing home life before the invasion of the Nazis, made clear in a burning foreword what that coming had cost. Josephine Blackstock's Wings for Nikias brought into the war a lad in Greece; Eleanor Lattimore's Questions of Lifu, a little chap in China. The tendency of our children's books to introduce young Americans to little folks in other lands took on new vitality: such books this year were about children in nations united with us in a world effort, so that from Pearl Buck's story for little children about The Chinese Children Next Door, and Theresa Kalab's English boy and his carrier pigeon in Watching for Winkie, to Antoni Gronowicz's Bolek in the invasion of Poland, there was a sense of 'we're all in this together.'

Illustration and Fantasy.

Color was treasured and appreciated this year, perhaps because difficulties in production had already sharply set in. Feodor Rojankovsky's brilliant hues and robust treatment of children's faces and of animals distinguished two new editions, Kipling's Just So Stories and The Tall Book of Mother Goose. Gustaf Tenggren's full-color imaginative illustrations for Katherine Gibson's retelling of little novels for the nursery were in The Tenggren Tell-it-again Book. Clement Hurd's color pictures distinguished The Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise Brown's adaptation of an old folk-rhyme to babies anywhere, and Marguerite de Angeli's color plates heightened her story of foreign-born Americans, Up the Hill. Black-and-white came to its own in C. W. Anderson's large lithographs of race horses in Thoroughbreds, Wesley Dennis's Flip and the Cows, and in a fantasy by C. E. Forester, Poo-Poo and the Dragons, in which Robert Lawson's jolly drawings domesticated these creatures in an English village. There were other fantasies: in Twig, by Elizabeth Orton Jones, a child created her fairyland in a tenement court; Andrew Lang's Prince Prigio was revived with delightful Lawson drawings, and Helen Sewell illustrated a new selection from Bulfinch as A Book of Myths. In Hi-po the Hippo, by Dorothy Thomas, fantasy joined burlesque in some of the most distinguished of recent colored lithographs, by Ruth Gannett. Tree-in-the-Trail by Holling C. Holling, pictured history in our Southwest in living hues, and Arensa Sondergaard and Fritz Kredel's My First Geography of the Americas gave a beginner of any age a pictorial sweep, in color, of both continents.

Home Life Tales.

Family life in America today inspired some of the best stories: Eleanor Estes's The Middle Moffat, taken with The Moffats, comes nearer than any other American story for ten-year-olds to approximating a contemporary equivalent of Little Women, Elizabeth Enright's The Four-Story Mistake has true American family spirit; and in The Hill of Little Miracles Valenti Angelo enriches this literature with the exploits of Italo-Americans on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. Muriel Denison's Happy Tramps brought a girl and her prize sheep-dog from England for the duration; Phil Stong's Way Down Cellar was a small-boy secret society in Connecticut. Katherine Milhous' Herodia, the Lovely Puppet, with her own color illustrations, is an American period piece. So, too, Mabel Leigh Hunt's Have You Seen Tom Thumb? with Fritz Eichenberg's decorations, is a sympathetic study of Charles Stratton and Barnum.

Biography.

Biography for young people, now so well developed here that its best examples are recommended to adult beginners, set a new standard this year in Leo Lerman's Michelangelo: a Renaissance Profile, an evocation of the time and the man, whose many illustrations were chiefly photographs of his works. Covelle Newcomb's life of Cervantes, Vagabond in Velvet; Alice Curtis Desmond's full-length portrait, Martha Washington, our First Lady; The Man Who Dared to Care, by Mary Tarver Carroll, an inspiring life of James Oglethorpe; William O. Stevens's panorama of naval history in David Glasgow Farragut; and Helen Nicolay's personalized period history, Decatur of the Old Navy, presented famous personages to the teens, while a group of American characters not so familiar included Shooting Star, William E. Watson's life of Tecumseh; Howard Fast's Goethals; Alden Hatch's Glenn Curtiss; Shannon Garst's Kit Carson; and Leslie Allen Jones's Eli Terry, Clockmaker of Connecticut. Indeed, in this field we are faced with the possibility not of under-supply, but of over-production; the use of dialogue — save in those meant for the older teens — preserves the quality of narrative, but in all the better examples the authentication has been more careful than that of most 'fictionized biographies' for adults.

Miscellaneous.

Among stories for young folks over twelve we had the thoroughly reliable Recruit for Abe Lincoln by Maribelle Cormack; William S. Resnick's Dragon Ship and Catherine Cate Coblentz's Falcon of Eric the Red, romances of Viking settlement; New Town in Texas by Siddie Joe Johnson; The Blue Hills by Elizabeth Goudge, which was welcomed by any age because it brought back a favorite heroine; Phyllis Crawford's Last Semester, a college story; Elizabeth Foreman Lewis's timely story of China, When the Typhoon Blows; a sympathetic fictionization of the life of H. C. Andersen, Julian David's The Three Hanses; Missee Lee, an unexpected pirate story by the favorite English author Arthur Ransome; Hubert Skidmore's realistic Hill Lawyer; Erick Berry's historical Hudson Frontier; Kitty Barnes's May I Keep Dogs? a wartime story from England; and Howard Fast's Tall Hunter, introducing Johnny Appleseed.

No effort has been made to confine this review to books written by Americans: works from overseas, especially those originally written in English, form part of our children's libraries. One picture-book feature, however, did not cross the ocean from England, where it was a distinctive phenomenon of attempted invasion save in treasured copies in the collection of 'Books Across the Sea': this was the emergence of the barrage balloon as a new character in fiction, something between a sort of secular guardian angel and a flying elephant such as Walt Disney creates. It is possible that the highly popular London storybooks The Adventures of Johnny Balloon, Nelson the King's Kite, Bulgy or Blassom the Brave Balloon will figure in historical collections of the future as records of the adjustment of little children to the conditions of war.

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.

1941: Literature, World

The books that have appeared this year, whether they deal with factual events or with experiences of mind and feeling, are for the most part documents of war. And even among those that seem remote from war there are many which are conscious escapes from it or rapid summings up of familiar things that war has altered. There are the active words of generals and statesmen; accounts and analyses of conflict and reconstruction by scholars, artists, journalists; simple records of disaster by ordinary men who had never thought of writing for the public; reminiscences of peaceful years; fictional narratives based on fighting and its results.

ENGLAND

Most important of the publications by leading men is, without doubt, Blood, Sweat and Tears, speeches delivered by Winston Churchill between May 1938 and February 1941. There are also collections of addresses by Lord Halifax between Feb. 6, 1934 and Feb. 27, 1940, Speeches on Foreign Policy, and one of excerpts from those of Ernest Bevin, The Balance Sheet of the Future. Sir Archibald Wavell's Generals and Generalship contains three lectures delivered two years ago at Trinity College, Cambridge; and his admiring biography, Allenby: a Study in Greatness, is another analysis by the renowned commander of qualities demanded of military leaders.

A number of outstanding men in the British Labour Party are represented in Labour's Aims in War and Peace, edited by C. R. Attlee. Francis Williams, former editor of the London Daily Herald, has published two books, Democracy's Battle and War by Revolution, concerning the rise of dictatorships and means of coping with them. The second volume of Professor W. K. Hancock's Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, dealing with problems of economic policy from 1918 to 1939, has appeared. J. B. Priestley's Out of the People is a lecture about the political and social reconstruction which England faces; Julian Huxley's radio talks, Democracy Marches, are on the same subject, and his Man Stands Alone is a collection of essays 'towards some new formulation of our basic beliefs and attitudes.' The English Are Like That is an analysis of his compatriots by Philip Carr. This War We Wage by Herbert Morrison, Howard Spring, and E. M. Delafield, England Speaks, a symposium by eight well known writers, John Strachey's A Faith to Fight For, and David Thomson's The Democratic Ideal in France and England, are all discussions of the principles for which England fights.

Among personal narratives of England at war are John Strachey's direct account of his experiences as air raid warden, Digging for Mrs. Miller; Vera Brittain's journalistic, patriotic England's Hour; Phyllis Bottome's detailed description of London and Liverpool under bombardment, Mansion House of Liberty; Margaret Kennedy's journal from May to September 1940, Where Stands a Winged Sentry; Margery Allingham's narrative of life in a small English village during the first year and a half of war, The Oaken Heart; and Their Finest Hour, a collection of first hand stories gathered and edited by two American newspaper men, Allan Michie and Walter Graebner. There is a picture of Provence at the outbreak of the war and of a village in Sussex after the capitulation in Lady Winifred Fortescue's Trampled Lilies, and a personal record by an English aviator of air war over France, Paul M. Richey's Fighter Pilot. There are records of Dunkirk: a compilation by Douglas Williams, war correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, of ten accounts by British soldiers who took part in the evacuation, Retreat from Dunkirk; and John Masefield's simple, graphic little book of sixty pages, The Nine Days Wonder, with five heroic lyrics in memory of the event. And there is a day by day account of twenty days after the break-through at Sedan, The Road to Bordeaux, by two English volunteers in the French army, C. D. Freeman and Douglas Cooper. The chief interest of Somerset Maugham's record of the war, Strictly Personal, is its analysis of French morale at the time of the downfall. Several collections of letters from Britain have been published, among which: Women of Britain, from British women between August 1939 and January 1941, assembled by Jan Struther; War Letters from Britain, edited by Mrs. Vincent Sheean (Diana Forbes-Robertson); and London Front, edited by Mr. and Mrs. H. M. Harwood. In Invasion in the Snow; a Study of Mechanized War by John Langdon-Davies we have an analysis of the Finnish war by an English correspondent. Rebecca West's 'magnum opus,' Black Lamb and Grey Falcon stands to rank as the most impressive book of the year. It is a travel diary of a trip to Yugoslavia in 1937 which, however, purports to be much more than that: 'an analysis of our culture, the world of ideas and emotions in which we live,' a kind of allegory of the whole of modern civilization. A pleasant book about sheep-farming in Wales, Thomas Firbank's I Bought a Mountain, seems to belong to another world or another age.

Of novels about the war, the long serious one by Eric Knight, This Above All, and Jane Nicholson's story of domestic life in London during August and September 1940, Shelter, attracted most attention. Storm Jameson's short novel, The Fort, attempts to concentrate in a conversation between French and English soldiers and a German captive the national psychologies involved in both Great Wars. Robert Greenwood's Mr. Bunting in Peace and War pictures the average 'little man' of England in war-time. Of fiction that does not deal with the war, we have notably Virginia Woolf's posthumous Between the Acts; Elizabeth Bowen's collection of short stories Look at all those Roses; Hugh Walpole's posthumous novel, Blind Man's House; Charles Morgan's The Empty Room, an allegorical reassertion of life and love against a background of war; John Buchan's last romance, Mountain Meadow; Compton Mackenzie's West to North, fourth installment in his The Four Winds of Love; and Phyllis Bentley's Manhold, which continues her fictionalized history of Yorkshire. The popular author of The Citadel, A. J. Cronin, has produced another melodramatic but well-written novel of facile moral teaching, The Keys of the Kingdom; and the equally popular James Hilton has added to Lost Horizon and Good-bye, Mr. Chips another sentimental, genial, and skillful story, Random Harvest. C. Day-Lewis has written a gruesome detective tale, The Corpse in the Snowman; Evan John Simpson, a historical novel about Marie Antoinette, King's Masque, not so good as his Crippled Splendor; J. C. Powys a two volume romance of Wales in the fifteenth century, Owen Glendower; and John Masefield a brief tale of rebellion in Byzantium in 532, Conquer.

More important than fiction has been the poetry of the year, for apart from certain volumes of traditional verse — collections of poems by Alice Meynell, Hilaire Belloc, Walter de la Mare, and others — there have been two or three publications of authentic and significant new poetry: W. H. Auden's The Double Man, brilliant in statement of the day's philosophic perplexities; Plant and Phantom by Louis MacNeice, undemonstrative and exquisitely pure; and the bitter, clever, passionate Selected Poems by George Barker.

The biographies and autobiographies have a strangely remote flavor, apart from one or two, such as Viscount E.A.R. Cecil's story of his life, A Great Experiment, which deals mostly with the League of Nations, and Sir George Compton's Concerning W. S. Churchill. John Masefield has written of his work in a mill in Yonkers, N. Y., over forty-five years ago, In the Mill; Aldous Huxley has given in Grey Eminence a portrait of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's invaluable aide and collaborator; and the autobiographies of Ernest Rhys, Wales England Wed, of Lady Winifred Fortescue, There's rosemary ... there's rue; of Richard Aldington, Life for Life's Sake, all have the air of period pieces.

Among critical essays should be mentioned The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, a simple, discriminating study by Louis MacNeice; and of scholarly publications, the inauguration of a Cambridge Economic History of Europe.

FRANCE

Analyses by the French of their country's débâcle have been numerous, the most significant being probably Jacques Maritain's factual, closely reasoned A Travers le Désastre. Very valuable also are Robert de Saint Jean's Démocratie, Beurre et Canons, an interpretation by 'the average educated French bourgeois,' especially noteworthy for its portrait of Paul Reynaud, with whom the author was in close collaboration; and the merciless Pierre Laval by the famous French attorney Henry Torrès. Translation at this time of General Charles de Gaulle's The Army of the Future, originally published in 1934 when its author was captain at St. Cyr, seems tragically ironic, as does also the admiring biography of her brother, André Maginot, Mme. Marguerite Joseph's He Might Have Saved France. Men of Europe is a dramatic, gossipy, behind-the-scenes account of events in Europe in the last two decades by a journalist who writes under the name of André Simone. They Speak for a Nation is a collection of excerpts, edited by Eve Curie, from letters by French men and women to friends in England and America; and All Gaul is Divided is another such collection, containing some sixteen letters from a French family living in the occupied zone.

Four French novels have been translated into English this year: Roger Martin du Gard's continuation of The Thibaults, Summer 1914; Jules Romains' Aftermath, the seventeenth and eighteenth volumes in the French edition of his Men of Good Will; Louis Aragon's long novel of French life from 1889 to the first World War, The Century Was Young; and the slight thing by Henri Troyat, Judith Madrier, which uses the present war as a backdrop for a story of amorous intrigues. There is a book, not yet translated, of literary studies of André Maurois, Études littéraires, with essays on Paul Valéry, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson, Paul Claudel, and Charles Peguy. An analysis of dictatorship, written over a hundred years ago, has been translated, Benjamin Constant's Prophecy from the Past: On Conquest and Usurpation.

GERMANY

An edition of Hitler's utterances has appeared as a sequel to Mein Kampf. This important collection, My New Order, edited with commentary by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, is chronologically arranged with a list of important events that give the background for each speech. The collection extends from an address on March 7, 1918, to workers organized to form a 'Labor Committee for a Good Peace' to the proclamation on June 22, 1941, announcing the invasion of Russia. Gottfried Leske's I Was a Nazi Flier is a further revelation of Nazi mentality, the diary of a young German airman who took part in the bombing of Belgium, Holland, France, and England. Alfred von Wegerer's The Origins of World War II, based on official documents, attempts to prove, as did the author's previous books about World War I, Germany's innocence in these conflicts.

Hermann Rauschning, author of The Revolution of Nihilism, has given a further analysis of National Socialism in The Redemption of Democracy; and in The Conservative Revolution has attempted to explain why he and his friends had first accepted Hitler, thinking for three years that they might be able to use him for their own liberal ends. A similar account, Fritz Thyssen's I Paid Hitler, is of the part played by German business men in Hitler's rise to power. Ernst Fraenkel's The Dual State is an independent analysis of Nazi dictatorship, a study of Nazi law by a labor lawyer who had practised in Berlin before Hitler and, although anti-Nazi, stayed there until 1938. Sebastian Haffner's Germany: Jekyll and Hyde is a study by a young German emigré of 'the habits of mind that have dominated the German Reich from Bismarck to Hitler.' The author's theory is that because Germans lack the political sense to control a large state, they should, after the defeat of Nazism, return to the small states system of 1866. Emil Ludwig's The Germans is an attempt to explain German character through a historical résumé of 2,000 years. Similar attempts have been made through compilations of German works, such as Will Schaber's Thinker vs. Junker, a 'collection of speeches, aphorisms, essays and letters written by the best of German minds from the reign of Frederick the Great to Nazism,' ending with Thomas Mann's Christmas message to the German people in 1940.

Among personal narratives of German refugees are O. Zarek's autobiography, Splendor and Shame; Renée Brand's Short Days Ago; the accounts in William Allen Neilson's collection, We Escaped, which contains stories also of fugitives of other nationalities; and The Spoil of Europe, an apparently authentic 'exposition of the Nazi technique in the political and economic conquest of Europe' by one who has had access to important documents and who writes under the name Thomas Reveille. Martin Gumpert's First Papers, with a preface by Thomas Mann, gives flattering impressions of America by a distinguished doctor who escaped from Nazi Germany five years ago. Lion Feuchtwanger's The Devil in France is an account of his experiences in concentration camps in France, and A. Reiner's The Coward Heart is a melodramatic novel of German exiles in Paris before the invasion. E. M. Remarque's new novel, Flotsam, tells of three German refugees obliged to flee from country to country in Europe.

The most distinguished German work of the year is a short novel by Thomas Mann, The Transposed Heads, an allegory, based on an Indian fable. A book of poems by Rudolf Fuchs, who is well known for his translations of Czech poetry, Gedichte aus Reigate, has appeared in England in a limited edition of 150 copies. There is a new edition of Franz Kafka's The Castle, with a brief introduction by Thomas Mann, and A Franz Kafka Miscellany, which contains an autobiographic sketch, unpublished parts of The Castle, and extracts from Max Brod's biography of Kafka and from Kafka's Letter to my Father.

Alex Bein's Theodore Herzl is an able biography of the originator of the Zionist movement. Friedrich Engels' unfinished work on the philosophy of science from the Marxist standpoint, Dialects of Nature, has appeared in translation, as has also, for the first time, a classic of German religious philosophy, Herder's God, Some Conversations.

OTHER COUNTRIES

From what it is possible to gather, the literary output of all other countries has been so slight this year that is seems wiser to consider it as a whole instead of separately, according to nationalities.

There are, to begin with, important accounts of the German invasion: that of Czechoslovakia in Ten Million Prisoners by Vojta Beneš, elder brother of Eduard Beneš and once Senator in his country's Republic, written in collaboration with R. A. Ginsburg; of the Netherlands, in Juggernaut over Holland, an extraordinarily restrained account by the Dutch Foreign Minister, E. N. V. Kleffens; of Norway, by her Minister of Foreign Affairs, Halvdan Koht, Norway Neutral and Invaded, the most authoritative account to date of that phase of the war. We have also personal narratives of imprisonment and escape, among the best of which are those by two Hungarians: Hans Habe's A Thousand Shall Fall, and Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth. Koestler is already known for his unusual work on the Moscow Trials, Darkness at Noon.

There are several important works of history and on the theory of history. The 1911 one volume abridgment of Mikhail Sergeevich Grushevskü's standard A History of the Ukraine has been translated into English and brought up to date; Salvador de Madariaga, whose excellent Christopher Columbus appeared in 1940, has published a magnificent history of the conquest of Mexico, Hernan Cortes, Conqueror of Mexico; and Count Carlo Sforza, one time Foreign Minister of Italy, has written in Fifty Years of War and Diplomacy in the Balkans a story principally of Yugoslavia and of her remarkable peasant statesman, Nicholas Pashich. Professor Guglielmo Ferrero's The Reconstruction of Europe, the second volume in a trilogy on the Napoleonic Wars, deals with the post-war European situation of 1814 and 1815, pointing out analogies between that time and ours. Benedetto Croce, in History as the Story of Liberty, continues his previous work on the nature of historical thought; and Ortega y Gasset, in a collection of essays, Toward a Philosophy of History, ventures some novel theories concerning the origin of the State.

Outstanding among works of fiction is the Polish novel, Salt of the Earth, by Josef Wittlin. It is the story of the first World War, part of a trilogy, to be called The Saga of the Patient Foot-Soldier, which, although only now translated into English, has already appeared in nine other languages. Mikhail Sholohov has written another long novel of the Cossacks, The Don Flows Home to the Sea; from Sweden we have Harald Hornborg's Passion and the Sword, which won a prize as the best novel in Swedish by a Finnish author, and Vilhelm Moberg's The Earth Is Ours; and from Iceland, a simple, deeply pious story, The Good Shepherd, by Gunnar Gunnarsson. From Holland comes an able psychological novel, Willy Corsari's Man without Uniform. The Latin-American Prize Novel was Ciro Alegria's tale of a small village in the Peruvian mountains, Broad and Alien Is the World; and from China has come a translation of short stories, Ah Q, and Others, by the influential writer, Lusin, who died in 1936.

For the rest, the year has brought translations from two of the greatest modern Spanish authors: Truth of Two, poems by Pedro Salinas, and From Lorca's Theatre, five of Federico García Lorca's plays; a book of tributes from critics of many lands to Belgium's outstanding novelist, Témoignages sur Jean Tousseul, edited by J. P. Bonnami; a book about Switzerland, D. de Rougemont's and C. Muret's The Heart of Europe, 'neither history nor guide book,' but an attempt to describe how 'one people has managed to remain free and diverse yet united'; reminiscences by Mme. Pilsudska of her great husband, Pilsudski; a second book about China by Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek, China Shall Rise Again; an unusually entertaining travel book from Denmark, Hakon Mielche's Journey to the World's End; further translations from Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age and Stages on Life's Way; and a new, American edition of Jawaharlal Nehru's autobiography, Toward Freedom.

1941: Literature, Children's

The most significant feature of children's literature for the year 1941 was its spontaneous concentration of interest on American life, ideals and background. No individual, certainly no organized movement that could be called 'Americanization,' was responsible for this. It was not even nationalistic, in the sense of being aggressive, and it was not in the least warlike. It was evident long before Pearl Harbor, and as it is at least a matter of months for a child's book to go through the processes of preparation and publication, this wave of feeling must have been gathering much further back on the sea of our national consciousness. Authors, illustrators, publishers all over the country, seem to have realized, with the sharpening of vision that comes when something is threatened that familiarity has made almost invisible, the beauty of American life and the value of the American heritage.

American Ideals.

This urge to pass on that vision to the generation that would follow, gave to the year's books for children a special quality by which they will be remembered; it appeared in picture-books, especially such as were illustrated in colors by well-known artists. An American ABC, by Maud and Miska Petersham, alternated such pictures with simple narratives to show crucial instances in our history; though these were alphabetically arranged, the age-limit of the work extended beyond beginners' years. Lief the Lucky, by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, in large colored lithographs and a text drawn from research in Scandinavian sources, made a genuine contribution to our pre-Columbian history. In Marguerite De Angeli's color-illustrated Elin's Amerika early settlers brought Sweden to the banks of the Delaware, their children becoming part of a new world.

A different manifestation of the same feeling was Little Town, by Berta and Elmer Hader; this community, easily identified as the one where they live, but just as easily identifiable as any one of hundreds of comfortable riverside communities, is shown in pictures and text in the details of everyday life. Its feature is that as these are infused with the loving pride of its inhabitants, the book presents a town not only as it is seen, but as it is loved. In My Mother's House, by Ann Nolan Clark, illustrated by Velino Herrera in the traditional Indian manner, shows life in a pueblo near Santa Fé, in characteristic cadence and with the same pride and tenderness. This book received one of the New York Herald-Tribune's prizes of the Children's Spring Book Festival in May, as the most distinguished publication for little children. For those in the middle group the prize went to Tom Robinson's Pete, story of an airedale in a typically American home, and Clara Barton, by Mildred Mastin Pace, a spirited biography of the Civil War heroine whose work lives in present-day war nursing, was the judges's choice for older children. Using a hand-lettered text thickly sprinkled with colored pictures, as in her last year's Little History, Mable Pyne carried out a more difficult task in her Little Geography of the United States. Holling C. Holling's Paddle to the Sea showed an Indian boy who carved a miniature canoe and so set it adrift that it floated through the Great Lakes into the ocean; by large colored pictures of what it passed this made an unusual addition to geography. The Mississippi, large color-plates by C. H. De Witt, story by Marshall McClintock, carried small children downstream.

Fantasies and Medal-Winners.

Even classic mythology moved for the moment to America: the most graceful fantasy of the year was Dorothy Lathrop's The Colt from Moon Mountain in whose pictures and story a little girl on a New England farm makes friends with what turns out to be a baby unicorn. The fantasy in Robert Lawson's I Discover Columbus was light-heartedly unhistorical, showing what the Great Admiral's parrot thought of the Great Voyage; the same friendly satire showed in his pictures for Munro Leaf's Simpson and Sampson, story of two medieval knights handicapped by being identical twins. Mr. Lawson's all-American picture-book of 1940, They Were Strong and Good, won this year's Caldecott Medal, while the Newbery Medal went to Armstrong Sperry's Call It Courage, with his own pictures, which though taking place in the South Seas brought out the same qualities in boy nature that the present-day crisis is developing in the United States.

Wanda Gag's fantasy kept clear of time and space; in her first color-picture-book for children, Nothing at All, she showed the career of an invisible dog — something harder to do than it sounds. Peter Churchmouse, story and pictures by Margot Austin, was a strong popular success; it told small children about an unusual friendship between a mouse and the kitten appointed to attend to him. W. P. DuBois's The Flying Locomotive took a Swiss milk-train into the air.

Home Life Tales.

Stories of home-life at the present time, possibly taking for granted that there is already in our children's literature at least one story about home-life in every land however remote, concentrated on the home front. The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes, was the every-day career of a poor family that happily got into everything. The Saturdays, illustrated by the author, Elizabeth Enright, showed another enterprising family group, this time in New York. Phil Stong's Captain Kidd's Cow sent real small boys peacefully pirating on an Iowan river. Lottie's Valentine, by Katherine Eyre with pictures by Susanne Suba, was a charming period piece of New Orleans. Run, Run! by Harry Granick, combined hilarity and social significance in a story of children visiting New York. Three from Greenways, by Alice Dalgliesh was much the best of several stories based on the coming of English children to America for the duration.

Biography.

In the field of biography — unusually well-filled this year — the same choice of subject prevailed. The Julia Ellsworth Ford Foundation Prize was well and truly won by Babette Deutsch's Walt Whitman: Builder for America, which combined an admirable life with a poet's introduction to his work. Other American subjects included, for older children, Young Edgar Allan Poe, by Laura Benét; Singing Sisters, by Laura Long, a study of Alice and Phebe Carey and their time; Dana of the Sun, by Alfred H. Fenton; River Boy, Mark Twain's story by Isabel Proudfit; Alexander Hamilton, by Johan Smertenko; Knight of the Sea, Corinne Low's stirring study of the career of Decatur; Narcissa Whitman, by Jeannette Eaton, which will be read also by many adults; The Man Who Would Not Wait, a well-balanced treatment of Aaron Burr by Mary Tarver Carroll; and two noteworthy biographies illustrated by James Daugherty, his own Poor Richard, and The Way of an Eagle, a panorama of Jefferson's life and times by Sonia Daugherty.

Among biographies for young children we had a blend of music and information in Opal Wheeler's Stephen Foster, one of a series of which children much approve; Ben Franklin, Printer's Boy, by Augusta Stevenson; and a real-life thriller by R. H. Chavanne based on the career of one who went to sea early, David Farragut, Midshipman.

History.

The most important work of non-fiction for the children's year was in the field of history: Genevieve Foster's George Washington's World gave, in successive cross-sections, a view of what was going on elsewhere in the world as well as in America, at stages of Washington's life.

In historical fiction writers for children began to do their duty by the American Revolution, which had hitherto kept its place in our children's fiction by reason rather of numbers than of merit. Coat for a Soldier, by Florence M. Updegraff; and Sons of Liberty, by Gertrude Robinson, showed not only what went on then but the spirit in which they went on. Down Ryton Water, by E. R. Gaggin, for older children, and John of Pudding Lane, by Mabel Leigh Hunt, took place in Colonial times. A story of marked distinction was Indian Captive by Lois Lenski, based on the life of Mary Jemison. The outstanding junior novel for the middle period in the Middle West was what seems to be the concluding volume of Laura Wilder's autobiographical romance for children under twelve: Little Town on the Prairie; this honest, stimulating and completely lifelike family record deserves a permanent place in our young literature. Sing for Your Supper, by Lenora Mattingly Weber, brought back wagon-show days not long after the Gold Rush in California. Growing up with America, an extensive anthology, gathered stories of boys and girls from our literature of childhood chronologically arrayed to show what life was like for children from Colonial times to the turn of the century and even after. At this turn of the century the amusing adventures in Janette Sebring Lowry's Rings on her Fingers took place in Texas. Sarah Deborah's Day, by Charlotte Jackson, came during real Gold Rush years in California, when all sorts of things could and did happen. Cornelia Meigs chose the Mississippi River in the 'nineties for her story of a boy's solving his own problems in Vanished Island. Elizabeth Howard's Sabina lived in Detroit a century ago; The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds, one of the most strikingly illustrated of true stories for younger boys, showed in stirring narrative and by Paul Laune's color plates how a little chap in the Mohawk Valley defended his home against Indians in days before the Revolution. Yankee Doodle's Cousins, by Anne Malcolmson with Robert McCloskey's pictures, displayed America's folk-heroes in action. Another feature of this year's historical fiction was the appearance in it of places whose possibilities as subjects for adventurous and stimulating stories had not hitherto been recognized.

Stories of Latin America.

Latin America was naturally a popular subject, so much so that its representation in children's books was uncommonly large, but many of these were of the textbook or semi-schoolbook type outside the scope of this survey. The most important of the year was Wings Over South America, resulting from a long tour by air around the continent which the author, Alice Dalgliesh, and the illustrator in color, Katherine Milhaus, were commissioned to take under circumstances most favorable to establishing understanding. The Story of the Other America, by Richard C. Gill and Helen Hoke, and Picture Map of Geography of South America, by Vernon Quinn, reinforced information with many illustrations; Panchita, by Delia Goetz, presented the life of a little girl of Guatemala. There were two full-length biographies of the great liberator-hero, Simon Bolivar, by Elizabeth Waugh, and He Wouldn't be King, by Nina Brown Baker; and Marian Lansing carried on her historical and biographical Heroes and Liberators of South America with Liberators and Heroes of Mexico and Central America.

Religious Books.

Finally, there was a significant upturn of interest in religion as subject-matter for children's reading, not in the interests of any particular form of faith but in response to a realization on the part of parents that much they had taken for granted as part of their children's mental equipment, because it had been made part of theirs, was not there. Books of prayers, such as children say, came out and were taken in without suspicion of sanctimoniousness; they were given beautiful pictures and offered as books little children would like, and they did. A Bible ABC, by Grace Hogarth, to be given to children as young as three, made a gentle and alluring introduction. In books for older children this was also noticeable: for the first time a history of the Christian faith, simply told and avoiding controversial issues, was successfully made for young people in Roland Bainton's Church of our Fathers; the first biography of Cardinal Newman for the teens appeared, Covelle Newcomb's The Red Hat, and Princess Poverty, by Sarah Maynard, a double biography of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Claire, appealed to anyone of simple faith.

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.