ISSUE: Summer 1984
To most living Americans, the Great Depression is little more than an historical expression, a reference to a time long ago and far away when Franklin D. Roosevelt saw “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” To scout the heartland of the Depression, Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins dispatched a former wire service reporter named Lorena Hickok, and her reports became a classic commentary on the era of breadlines, soup kitchens, and Americans living in makeshift shacks. Illinois recently issued a paperback edition of this commentary entitled One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression, edited by Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley and considered “indispensable for any student of the Depression years” by Choice magazine [$9.95]. Indiana has published a revised and enlarged edition of Russell F. Weigley’s History of the United States Army, with an extensive new chapter on the Army since the 1960’s to the present, including an analysis of the impact of the Vietnam War [$10.95 paper]. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. is considered the dean of Southern literary criticism today; and his vast yet varied knowledge of Southern writers is reflected in A Gallery of Southerners, which Booklist cited as “a rare example of a literary critic who thinks the mind is a noble thing and offers it noble food” and which Louisiana has republished [$8.95 paper]. Chicago is offering a paper edition of Daniel Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs, a study of 12 prominent American Whigs, ranging from John Quincy Adams to Horace Greeley [$11.50 paper]. Massachusetts has come out with a paper edition of David P. Szatmary’s Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection, considered a standard work on one of the events which led to the adoption of the Constitution [$8.95]. Another aspect of American history is examined in Ferol Egan’s The El Dorado Trail: The Story of the Gold Rush Routes across Mexico now available in a paper edition from Nebraska [$7.95]. The objective of those taking the El Dorado Trail—California—is the subject of another reprint, namely, The WPA Guide to California, prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930’s, with a new introduction by Gwendolyn Wright, a recent Pantheon paperback [$11.95]. Johns Hopkins has issued a new edition of Barbara Sinclair’s Majority Leadership in the U.S. House, an examination of the operational reforms made in the House of Representatives during the 1970’s [$25.00 cloth, $12.95 paper]. The Pilgrim Press has published a paper edition of The Big Business Reader, revised, enlarged, and edited by Mark Green and containing more than 50 articles on how corporate power directly affects our lives, with an introduction by consumer protection champion Ralph Nader [$12.95]. A paper edition of Peter N. Carroll’s It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970’s is being offered by Holt, Rinehart & Winston [$9.95].
New editions of two notable works about Georgia before and during the Civil War have been brought out by Yale and Georgia, respectively. The Yale publication is an abridged edition of Robert Manson Myers’ The Children of Pride, a highly acclaimed selection of letters of the family of the Rev. Dr. Charles Colcock Jones from the years 1860—68, with the addition of several previously unpublished letters, the original edition of which won the 1973 National Book Award for History as well as being named among the best books of 1972 by the American Library Association, Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times Book Review [$25.00 cloth]. Georgia has republished Frances Anne Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838—39, edited, with an introduction, by John A. Scott, a journal originally published in 1863 which has long been recognized by historians as unique in the literature of American slavery and of life in the antebellum South as seen through the eyes of one of England’s leading actresses in the 19th century [$9.95 paper]. Touchstone has come out with paper editions of Joan Givner’s Katherine Anne Porter: A Life, a biography called “vivid and authoritative” by Henry James author Leon Edel [$10.95], and Ernest K. Gann’s Fate Is the Hunter, long considered one of the great autobiographical accounts of aviation [$9.95]. Another new Touchstone paper edition is Ted Morgan’s Maugham: A Biography, a full-scale recounting of the life of one of this century’s most prolific literary figures which author Paul Theroux found to be “unfailingly fascinating” [$12.95]. A recent Vintage Book is Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro’s Son of the Revolution, Heng’s autobiographical account of growing up in Communist China amid the turmoil of the great Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s [$5.95]. Also available from Vintage is Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, the story of an illiterate, black tenant farmer in Alabama during segregation’s heyday [$8.95]. As part of its English Monarchs series, California has come out with a paper edition of Charles Ross’ Richard III, a biography of one of England’s least-liked—and least-understood—sovereigns [$8.95]. Rosemary Ashton’s George Eliot, a volume in Oxford’s Past Masters series, is out in a paper edition [$3.95]. Clearly with its eye on the 1984 presidential campaign, Perennial Library has reissued Finlay Lewis’s Mondale: Portrait of an American Politician in a fully revised and updated edition [$3.95 paper]. Irving Howe’s A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography has been reprinted as a Harvest/HBJ Book [$7.95 paper]. Paris in the 20’s is the subject of Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, 1920—1930, a memoir which originally appeared in 1934 and which North Point Press has republished, with supplementary chapters and an afterword by Kay Boyle, another American in the “city of light” during the 20’s [$13.50 paper].
One of the foremost essayists and editors of his time, Cyril Connolly devoted his life to literature and the arts after being educated at Eton and Oxford, and two collections of his works have recently come out in new editions, thanks to Stanley Moss/ Persea Books. The first is The Selected Essays of Cyril Connolly, edited and with an introduction by Peter Quennell, and ranging across a spectrum of subjects from James Joyce to book reviewing [$17.95 cloth]. Then there is Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, first published in 1938 and long out of print, which its author described as “a didactic inquiry into the problem of how to write a book which lasts ten years,” and also containing the line through which Connolly may have attained lasting fame: “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising” [$6.95 paper]. Simon & Schuster has two recent paper reprints dealing with the pains, pitfalls, and pleasures of writing, one being Theodore M. Bernstein’s Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears, and Outmoded Rules of English Usage [$6.95], and the other being Willard Espy’s Have a Word on Me: A Celebration of Language [Touchstone Books, $6.95]. Louisiana has come out with paper editions of James Dickey’s Self-Interviews and Sorties, both dealing with the artistic development of one of America’s most prominent poets as well as with poetry itself [$6.95 and $7.95, respectively]. Another Louisiana offering is Lewis P. Simpson’s The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature [$4.95 paper], A recent Harper/Colophon Book is Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Erich Segal [$9.95]. Missouri has published a new and revised edition of Milton’s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, edited by C.A. Patrides [$30.00 cloth, $ 13.50 paper], When it was first published in America in 1934, Logan Pearsall Smith’s All Trivia, a collection of aphorisms and reflections, was a popular and critical success, so much so that 50 years later it has been reissued by Ticknor & Fields [$7.95 cloth]. Evan S. Connell’s prose poem, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel, which the Los Angeles Times deemed “a brilliant, bravura piece of work” at the time of its publication in 1963, is again available as a North Point Press book [$10.00 paper]. Johns Hopkins has reprinted Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation, a book considered “powerful and provocative” by Cornell’s Jonathan Culler [$18.50 cloth, $4.95 paper]. Oxford has brought out a paper edition of Helen Gardiner’s Religion and Literature, containing two sets of lectures on related themes, “Religion and Tragedy” and “Religious Poetry” [$9.95].
“Comparable to Scott and Dumas. . . a romance on the grand scale and in the grand manner,” said The New York Times Book Review of Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jew Süss at the time of its initial publication in 1926. Now Carroll & Graf are offering a new edition of this novel of 18th-century Germany [$18.95 cloth, $8.95 paper]. St. Martin’s has reissued Margaret Irwin’s The Bride, a novel involving the times and trials of England’s Charles II originally published in 1939 [$12.95 cloth]. The latest additions to California’s Mark Twain Library are A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court [$3.95 paper] and The Prince and the Pauper [also $3.95 paper]. The Anchor Library is offering paper editions of two works by Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, and Nabokov’s Dozen, a collection of 13 short stories [$6.95 each]. Two recent additions to Dial Press’s Virago Modern Classic series are Elizabeth Jenkins’ The Tortoise and the Hare [$6.95 paper] and Ruth Adam’s I’m Not Complaining [$7.95 paper]. Perennial Library has a paper edition of E.F. Benson’s trilogy, Make Way for Lucia, each with a foreword by Nancy Mitford, the respective volumes being Queen Lucia, Part I; Lucia in London, Part II, and Miss Mapp, Part III [$3.95 each]. As a result of the American success of Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party, Penguin Books has reprinted three of her earlier novels in one volume under the collective title Three Novels, they being The Blackmailer, A Man of Power, and The Great Occasion [$8.95 paper, also available in cloth from Viking for $25.00]. Bison Books has new paper editions of Mark Harris’s baseball classics The Southpaw [$7.95] and Bang the Drum Slowly [$6.50],
Georges Duveau’s 1848:The Making of a Revolution, an account of the day-to-day events in Paris from February to June 1848 has been ranked alongside the works of Marx and Tocqueville on the subject, and a new paper edition of this classic work has been published by Harvard [$6.95]. Also considered a landmark study is George H. Stein’s The Waffen SS: Hitler’s Elite Guard at War, 1939—1945, and it has been reissued by Cornell [$10.95 paper]. Johns Hopkins has brought out a paper edition of Sidney W. Mintz’ Caribbean Transformations, a study of the origins and development of Afro-Caribbean culture [$9.95]. Drew Middleton’s Crossroads of Modern Warfare examines 16 20th-century battles that shaped contemporary history and is now available as a Peter Bedrick Book [$7.95 paper]. Recent Washington reprints include Soviet Policy toward Western Europe: Implications for the Atlantic Alliance, a series of essays edited by Herbert J. Ellison [$30.00 cloth, $14.95 paper], and Peter F. Sugar’s Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354—1804, the fifth volume in a history of East Central Europe [$12,95 paper]. Yale has brought out a paper edition of Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, a co-winner of the American Political Science Association’s 1983 Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy [$7.95 paper.]
