ISSUE: Spring 1938
“Here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal,”
Beginning with the second number of the Virginia Quarterly, July, 1925, Gerald W. Johnson has been a frequent contributor of essays and book reviews. Most of his essays have dealt with Southern problems, but his defense of the right of “free lying,” “When to Build a Barricade,” is a discussion of the national problem of the defense of democratic institutions. Mr. Johnson is an editorial writer for the Baltimore Evening Sun. He is a native of North Carolina, and the author of biographies of Andrew Jackson and John Randolph of Roanoke.
Jonathan Daniels is also a journalist and a native of North Carolina. As editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, he decided that he needed to discover the South for himself, and set out on a pilgrimage that took him into every state below the Potomac. “Gold Avenue” records his impressions of the most industrialized part of the South, the textile district of the Carolinas. Mr. Daniels was educated at the University of North Carolina, and was on the staff of Fortune before becoming editor of the News and Observer. This spring he will publish “A Southerner Discovers His South.”
The military genius of General Ludendorff has been the subject of frequent comment since his death in December, 1937; but few writers have dealt with Ludendorff’s political stupidity, which John W. Wheeler-Bennett believes was the cause of the failure of his military talent to achieve victorv in the World War. “Ludendorff: The Soldier and the Politician” is, in the author’s words, a study of a “political Hyde forever warring against a military Jekyll.” Mil Wheeler-Bennett’s familiarity with the evidence in Ludendorff’s case is attested by his most recent book, “Wooden Titan,” a study of Hindenburg’s role in wartime and post-war Germany. He is now at work on a book dealing with the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
Current critical battles over the relation of literature to politics give a special point to Mark Van Doren’s discussion of the role of rhetoric, which he defines as “the art of telling the truth.” “Literature and Propaganda” is the work of a poet and novelist as well as a critic. Mu. Van Doken’s latest novel is “The Transients,” and his most recent volume of verse is “The Last Look and Other Poems.” He is now preparing a collected edition of his poetry, to be published in the autumn.
As Max Lerner remarks in “Democracy with a Union Card,” the problem of democracy in the unions never aroused much discussion until the unions began to seek genuine political and economic power. Mr. Lerner believes that, given the proper attitude on the part of government and the public, the unions can achieve democracy within themselves and can contribute to the health of other democratic institutions. Mr. Lerner was educated at Yale University and at the Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Politics. After serving as associate editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences and teaching at Harvard University, he became an editor of The Nation. This autumn he will become professor of political science in Williams College.
Three poems by C. F. MacIntyre appeared in the Autumn, 1937, number of tbe Quarterly. He is the author of a volume of poems, and he is now engaged in translating fifty poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Robert Liddell Lowe first contributed to the Virginia Quarterly in the October, 1928, number. His poetry has appeared in a number of other magazines, and a group was published in “Trial Balances.” Edward Weismiller’s first volume of poetry, “The Deer Come Down,” was published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He is graduating this year from Cornell University and has just been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for study in Merton College, Oxford. Elizabeth Randall was educated at Vassar College and now lives in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Louis J. Halle, Jr., is a native of New York City, and a graduate of Harvard University. He spent some time working for a railway in Central America, and later worked in a New York publishing house. His first book, entitled “Transearibbean,” was published in 1930, and his second, “Birds Against Men,” will be published this spring. lie is now studying anthropology in Harvard University.
Short stories by Elick Moll have appeared in a number of magazines, in “New Letters in America,” and in “(). Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1937.” Mr. Moll attended the University of Chicago, and studied music at the American Conservatory. He is now living in New York.
“The Craft of Herman Melville” is the second critical essay by R. P. Blackmur to appear in the Virginia Quarterly; his study of Henry Adams, “The Expense of Greatness,” was published in the July, 1930, number. Mr. Blackmur is the author of a volume of literary criticism, “The Double Agent,” and of a volume of poetry, “From Jordan’s Delight.”
Kerker Quinn has contributed several book reviews to the Virginia Quarterly, and his essay, “Blake and the New Age,” appeared in the Spring, 1937, number. He is a member of the English faculty of the University of Illinois. Scott Buchanan is the author of “Poetry and Mathematics.” He was formerly professor of philosophy in the University of Virginia, and is now dean of St. John’s College, in Annapolis, Maryland. Charles B. Thompson is Senior Psychiatrist in the psychiatric division of the New York City Department of Hospitals, and the author of a number of technical essays in the field of psychiatry. Thomas Jewries Betts is a major in the United States Army, and is now studying in the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Joseph Warren Beach has written a number of books on English literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His most recent volumes are “The Twentieth-Century Novel” and “The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry.” Julius W. Friend is the co-author, with James Feibleman, of “Science and the S|>irit of Man” and of “The Unlimited Community.” John Calvin Metcalf is professor of English in the University of Virginia. W. T. Couch is director of the University of North Carolina Press. Francis P. Miller is secretary of the Southern Policy Committee, and a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. Wallace E. Caldwell is a member of the history faculty of the University of North Carolina.
THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW
Edited by LAMBERT DAVIS Advisory Editors
Hardy C. Dillard Arciiihai.d 13. Shkpperson
Garrard Glenn Carroll Mason Sparrow
John Calvin Metcai.e James Southall Wilson
Tiik Virginia Quarterly Review is published at the University of Virginia: in March, June, September, and December. Subscription rates: $3.00 the year. Canadian, $3.25; Foreign, $3.50. Single copies, 75 cents. The Virginia Quarterly Review is indexed in The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature,
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