ISSUE: Spring 1990
Richard M. Weaver was only 33 when the first edition of his work The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought was published in 1943, By the time Mr. Weaver died 20 years later at the comparatively early age of 53, The Southern Tradition had been acknowledged as a classic. Said noted historian Donald Davidson, in his comments on the first edition: “The present work . . .is in scope and theme very far-reaching, as its title and subtitle suggest.” A new edition of The Southern Tradition was recently published by Regnery Gateway [$21.95]. Princeton Professor of Politics Fred I. Greenstein is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the modern presidency, and he served as editor of Leadership in the Modern Presidency, a collection by nine eminent political scientists and historians presenting their assessment of the leadership styles and talents of presidents from Roosevelt through Reagan. The paper edition of Leadership has now been published by Harvard [$14.95, also available in cloth $29.95]. Transplanted Briton Alistair Cooke has been described by The New York Times as “one of the most successful communicators of his time . . .droll, witty and pungent.” Mr. Cooke’s ability to communicate is amply displayed in America Observed: From the 1940’s to the 1980’s, a collection of Cooke’s essays on America compiled by Ronald A. Wells which originally appeared in The Manchester Guardian. America Observed is now available as a Collier Books reprint [$8.95]. Bison Books has come out with a new edition of Comanche Bondage by Carl Coke Rister, an account of the unlucky homeseekers who followed the Englishman John Charles Beales to southern Texas late in 1834 [$7.50]. New York University Press has reissued a paper edition of Earl J. Hess’s Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union in which historian Hess looks at the impact the experience of the war (battlefield death and suffering) had on what people actually thought [$12.50].
Sir Winston Churchill, 1874—1965, was not only the greatest British statesman of the 20th century, he was also one of the island kingdom’s preeminent authors. And his accomplishments as a writer gained him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. He began his literary career at an early age after serving on India’s Northwest Frontier. He recounted his experiences there in The Story of the Malakand Field Force, his first book, originally published in March 1898. A year later, having left his regiment, the 4th Hussars, Churchill got himself accredited to The Morning Post as a war correspondent and went off to cover the Boer War, and his account of that war resulted in two books, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton’s March. As both are comparatively short and one follows directly from the other, Norton, also publisher of a new edition of The Malakand Field Force, has published them together under the title, The Boer War. Norton has also reprinted Churchill’s My African Journey, an account of his tour of East Africa in 1907 just after he was appointed to his first ministerial post as parliamentary under-secretary of state for the colonies. Handsomely reprinted in cloth the three volumes are priced respectively at $18.95, $19.95 and $17.95. Shortly after The Letters of Edith Wharton, edited by R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, appeared in 1988, novelist Louis Auchincloss described them as “vivid, deeply intelligent, and highly readable.” Selected from the more than 4,000 letters that have survived, the editors chose approximately 400, ranging from one written when Wharton was 12 to a letter penned just a few days before the novelist’s death in 1937. The Letters of Edith Wharton has been republished by Collier Books [$14.95 paper]. Collier Books has also come out with a new edition of Alan Paton’s Journey Continued, the second volume of the South African’s autobiography beginning in 1948, the year his acclaimed novel Cry, the Beloved Country was published [$12.95]; and Anthony Holden’s Laurence Olivier: A Biography [$14.95]. North Point Press has been reissuing a series of books by noted New Yorker writer, A.J. Liebling, the latest being The Honest Rainmaker: The Life and Times of Colonel John R. Stingo with a foreword by Garrison Keillor and Mark Singer. Liebling met the Honest Rainmaker in 1947 and published The Life and Times five years later [$9.95 paper]. As a part of its Library of Alabama Classic Series, Alabama has republished John M. Gibson’s Physician to the World, a study of the career of William Crawford Gorgas, focusing primarily on the 22 years from the Spanish-American War until his death at the age of 65. Gibson’s book describes the medical community’s gradual understanding of the mosquito as the cause of Yellow Fever and recounts Gorgas’ successful fight against the mosquito in the Panama Canal Zone [$15.95 paper]. Two recent editions to Harper & Row’s paperback Perennial Library Series are respectively Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage [$8.95] and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life: A Memoir [$8.95]. Grove Press has republished The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets as an Evergreen Book [$10.95].
In 1965 Scribner’s published The Edith Wharton Reader, a collection of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s finest works, edited with an introduction by Louis Auchincloss and spanning the breadth of Wharton’s career from her first collection of fiction, The Greater Inclination (1899), to her autobiographical reflections in A Backward Glance (1934), and including five of her best short stories. Collier Books has republished The Edith Wharton Reader [$13. 95]. As an addition to its Perennial Library Series, Harper & Row has put together what it describes as a “glorious collection of all the short stories featuring Jeeves, the perfect manservant, and Bertie Wooster, a 1920’s bachelor on the run,” two of the most enduring creations of British humorist P.G. Wodehouse. For the first time in paperback in America are 34 hilarious stories of London and the English countryside during the 1920’s [$10.95]. The Perennial Fiction Library has republished Joyce Carol Gates’ American Appetites which Publishers Weekly described as “a heady concoction of lust, murder, and courtroom drama” [$8.95]. Company K, published in 1933, was the first novel of William March, pen name for William Edward Campbell, and stemmed directly from the author’s experiences with the U.S. Marines in France during World War I. Alabama has republished the novel as part of the Library of Alabama Classics [$12.95]. Magnolia Press of Gainesville, Georgia has come forth with what it calls, “a major reprint” of William Gilmore Simms’ The Cassique of Kiawah: A Colonial Romance, the first edition of this novel to appear in more than 100 years, in which Simms portrayed the infant city of Charleston struggling to survive attacks from foreign invaders and outraged Indians [$15.00 paper]. Recent additions to the Collier Fiction Series include Believe Them, a collection of stories by Mary Robison [$7.95]; Paul West’s The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, a fiction spiritual odyssey [$9.95]; and Kevin McElvoy’s The Fifth Station, a novel about the steel industry and its workers [$6.95]. Atheneum has come out with a new edition of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, a funny slave’s-eye-view of the Civil War [$8.95 paper]. Carroll & Graf has paper editions of two mysteries, Hillary Waugh’s Sleep Long, My Love [$4.95] and Frederic Brown’s Murder Can Be Fun [$3.95]. Vintage International has an edition of Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King, the story of a Frenchman in Africa [$9.95].
