Maxwell Perkins has rightly been called an "editor of genius," partly if not largely because he was willing to gamble that today's unknown author can become tomorrow's toast of the literary town. Thus he bought an at-the-time risqué work from a Minnesota-born Princeton graduate at the outset of the twenties, thus he later persuaded the powers-that-were at Scribner's to accept a novel about expatriates in Paris and Spain, thus he finally turned the massive, meandering manuscript of a gangling North Carolinian into Look Homeward, Angel, and thus American literature was enriched by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Yet it seems likely that Max Perkins would be persona non grata in the commercial publishing world of the 1980's, a gifted gentleman hopelessly out of step with the times. Indeed, these are the times that would try Max Perkins' soul—the times of the big bucks and the big deals, of conglomerate giants and bottom lines, of blockbusters and hard-sell bookstores. And the climate of such times is hardly conducive to the nurturing of unknown and untried talent which—God forbid—could prove to be unprofitable. These times on the literary scene are the object of Mary Lee Settle's scorn—and the subject of her VQR essay. No one can accuse Ms. Settle of being a stranger to commercial publishing. As the author of nine novels and a nonfiction account of her World War II service in England, she has made the rounds of publishing houses and editors. She has also known the privations and prejudices so often the rewards of a serious fiction writer. In fact, it was not until after the publication of her eighth novel, Blood Tie, in the late summer of 1977 that Mary Lee Settle began to attract the serious attention of critics, and then only because the book won the National Book Award for fiction in April 1978. Now, however, with the publication in October 1980 of her ninth novel, Scapegoat, Ms. Settle appears to be gaining her rightful place in the literary firmament.

Charles Maechling, Jr. contends the present relationship between the United States and Japan constitutes a "brittle alliance." His description of this alliance, one more than three decades old, is not the orthodox view of U.S.-Japanese relations. It is, however, the view of a veteran observer of American diplomacy. After receiving his B.A. degree from Yale in 1941, Mr. Maechling entered the U.S. Navy and became a member of the secretariat of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and attended the 1943 Cairo Conference. Later, after receiving a law degree in 1949 from the University of Virginia and practicing law in New York and Washington, Mr. Maechling joined the Department of State, where he served as a special assistant to the Under-Secretary for Political Affairs and a special assistant to Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman in 1965—66.