ISSUE: Winter 1976
America’s political past is the subject of three new paperbacks from the Norton Library: The Presidency of George Washington by Forrest McDonald [$3.45], Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843—1852 by Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. [$4.95] and The Politics of Provincialism, The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918—1932 by David Burner [$3.95]. Bantam has weighed in (weight: two-and-a-half pounds) with William Manchester’s mammoth—and, according to Potomac pundit James Reston, “magnificent”—history of America from 1932 to 1972, The Glory and the Dream [$6.95]. Another look at America, more grim than glorious, is You Have Seen Their Faces [Arno Press, $6.95]. First published in 1937, with text by Erskine Caldwell and photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, the work depicts the terrible and tragic lives of Southern sharecroppers in the 1930’s.
The latest volume in Collier’s “Masters of World Literature” series is Dante by Francis Fergusson [$3.95]. The life and poetry of the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, are examined by Gerald Brenan in a Cambridge reprint [$5.95]. The late Paul Murray Kendall’s highly acclaimed Richard the Third is another addition to the Norton Library [$5.95]. A third edition of Irving Howe’s William Faulkner, A Critical Study has been published by Chicago [$3.95], and Cambridge now has a paperback edition of M. C. Bradbrook’s Malcolm Lowry, His Art and Early Life [$3.95]. The early years of Justice William O. Douglas are described in his autobiography, Go East, Young Man [Delta, $4.25].
A feast of fiction, ranging from classic hardbacks to contemporary paperbacks, awaits the reader of this section this winter. Among the classics are two hardbacks in the Oxford English Novels series: a new text of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, edited with an introduction by Harvey Peter Sucksmith [$21.00]; and Lothair, Benjamin Disraeli’s 1870 novel of Catholicism vis-à-vis Conservatism, edited with an introduction by Vernon Bogdanor [$14.75]. Chicago has a hardback edition of Isak Dinesen’s The Angelic Avengers [$8.95], a melodramatic thriller first published in 1946. Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, edited by Robert D, Bamberg, joins the Norton Critical Edition series [$15.00 hardback]. New and notable paperbacks include Graham Greene’s Orient Express [$1.95], Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye [$1.95] and Morris West’s Harlequin [$1.95], all from Pocket Books; Harold Loeb’s The Professors Like Vodka [$1.50] and Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds [$1.50], both new volumes in Popular Library’s “Lost American Fiction” collection; and B. Traven’s Government [$4.50], a novel about corruption in Mexico reprinted as part of Hill and Wang’s “American Century” series.
Houghton Mifflin has published a second, revised and enlarged edition of William Peden’s The American Short Story, Continuity and Change, 1940—1975 [$7.95 hardback]. Chicago has brought out second editions in paperback of Wallace Fowlie’s A Reading of Proust [$3.95] and Cecil Y. Lang’s The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle [$5.95]. Three new Noonday paper-backs are A Reader’s Guide to The Eighteenth Century English Novel by Frederick R. Karl [$4.95], The Making of Modem Drama by Richard Gilman [$4.50] and Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot edited by Frank Kermode [$4.95].
Of all the books so far written about World War II, none has surpassed the works of the late Cornelius Ryan in popularity. His trilogy of warfare—The Longest Day, The Last Battle and A Bridge Too Far—has now been put into a paperback package by Popular Library [Longest Day, $1.75; Battle and Bridge, $1.95 each].
