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Reprints & New Editions


ISSUE:  Autumn 1979

Carry Wills’ Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence has been praised as “the best and most thorough analysis of the Declaration ever written” and was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has now been republished in paperback by Vintage [$4.95]. Another study of American thought, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, by George H. Nash has just been reissued by Basic Books, with a new introduction by the author [$5.95]. New paperbacks from Chicago include a revised edition of William T. Hagan’s American Indians, a volume in The Chicago History of American Civilization [$4.95], a second edition of Alan Trachtenberg’s Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol [$6.95], and William Ker Muir, Jr.’s Police: Streetcomer Politicians[$5.95]. One of the more acclaimed books about the U. S. Supreme Court was written by Alpheus Thomas Mason, and LSU Press has recently brought out a third revised and enlarged edition of this work, entitled The Supreme Court from Taft to Burger [$17.50 cloth, $5.95 paper]. The prolific pen of Edmund Wilson is represented in two Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperbacks, one being The Twenties, edited and with an introduction by Leon Edel [$6.95] and the other being The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties [$7.95]. Farrar, Straus & Giroux has also brought out two reprints of works by New “Yorker writer John McPhee, the reprints being Pieces of the Frame [$4.95] and A Roomful of Hovings [$4.95], with the subjects of Mr. McPhee’s interests ranging from sport to Scotland, art to Africa. Few American states today generate quite the interest— or quite the controversy—as California, and, for those who wish to acquire a better knowledge of the state, AHM Publishing Corporation has issued a second edition of Andrew F. Rolle and John S. Gaines’s The Golden State: A History of California[$9.95 cloth, $5.95 paper]. Although the fighting has ceased, the literary tumult and shouting over the American tragedy in Vietnam continues, as manifested by the publication of three paperbacks. One is a Hill & Wang publication, Michael Charlton and Anthony Moricrieff’s Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam [$5.95]. A second, also a Hill and Wang book, is Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage’s Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army [$4.95], a volume which purports to show what went wrong with the U. S. Officer Corps in Vietnam. Finally, and perhaps best known because of the recent television version of the story, is C. D. B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire,the story of an American couple and their search to learn how their son died in Vietnam, which has been republished by Bantam Books [$2.75].

REPRINTS & NEW EDITIONS A Selective List FICTION

Indiana continues its hardback republication of the works of the 19th-century novelist, W. D. Howells, and has just issued Volume 18, The Quality of Mercy,originally published in March 1892 [$20]. The works of another 19th-century novelist, in this case England’s Thomas Hardy, are being republished in paperback by St. Martin’s, and the latest of the Wessex writer’s works to appear is his third published novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes [$2.95]. Nebraska’s Bison Book series has issued a paperback edition of Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird, a novel which won the 1977 National Book Award for fiction [$3.50]. Vintage Books is offering two novels by Robert Penn Warren, both set in his native Kentucky. One is Night Rider, Warren’s widely hailed first novel, originally published in 1939 [$2.95], and the other is World Enough and Time, originally published in 1950 [also $2.95]. Dorothy B. Hughes may not enjoy the reputation of a Dorothy L. Sayers or an Agatha Christie, but she is considered one of America’s ablest mystery writers, and Bantam Books is currently making her works available to a new generation of readers, with the latest novels to be republished being The Fallen Sparrow [$1.95] and The So Blue Marble[also $1.95]. Two other new Bantam Books are Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, described as a 20th-century Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [$2.25], and a new 87th Precinct thriller from Ed McBain, this being Long Time No See [$1.95]. Pocket Books has a new paperback edition of Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Time in Its Flight, a huge novel about a 19th-century New England family which has been compared to The Forsyte Saga and was a main Book-of-the-MonthClub selection [$2.95]. Among the other new Pocket Books are Jerome Weidman’s A Family Fortune, a novel of a Jewish gangster [$2.50] and Robert Miner’s Mother’s Day, a work about a man of the house who becomes the mother of his children [$1.95].

REPRINTS & NEW EDITIONS A Selective List LIVES & LETTERS

In 1948 Cambridge published W. W. Tarn’s two-volume account of Alexander the Great, and the work is now acknowledged as a classic study of the ancient Greek warrior. For those unfamiliar with Tarn’s volumes, a new edition is now available. Volume I, Alexander the Great: Narrative is an account of Alexander’s life [$18.50 cloth, $5.95 paper]. Volume II of Alexander the Great presents a detailed analysis of the sources and discussion of the main historical points so detailed that, according to one scholar, “little has in fact appeared on Alexander over the last 30 years that has not been directly related to Tarn’s book” [$39.50]. When Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821—1849 was first published, critic Hilton Kramer, writing in the New York Times Book Review, acclaimed it as “the best book any American writer has yet given us on the literary culture of 19th-century Russia.” Frank’s study is now available as a Princeton paperback [$4.95]. English poet and novelist Stephen Spender put together a series of essay on “poetry, politics, people” entitled The Thirties and After, which has recently been reprinted as a Vintage book [$4.95]. Like the proverbial river, the works of Virginia Woolf just keep rolling along, with the latest being republication of The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One, 1915—1919, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and with an introduction by Quentin Bell, a Harvest/ HBJ book [$3.95]. Charles Morgan, Jr. was a young lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15,1963, the day a bomb exploded in a church there, killing four black children. Morgan placed the blame for the tragedy squarely on the state’s white middle-class establishment and fashioned the results of that accusation into a narrative called A Time to Speak, which has been reissued as a Holt Paperback [$4.95]. During the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950’s, one of those falsely accused of being a member of the Communist Party was University of Washington professor Melvin Rader, and his personal account of his experiences can be found in False Witness, a recent Washington paperback [$5.95]. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames have edited and Houghton Mifflin has issued a paperback edition of Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, an autobiographical account of the American poet [$6.95]. Bantam Books has republished Patricia Bosworth’s Montgomery Clift, a sympathetic biography of the Hollywood actor [$2.75], as well as William Wright’s Heiress, an account of the life of cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post [$2.50]. The English writer, R. F. Delderfield, was best known for his romantic novels, but he also published a romantic account of Napoleon’s private life, Napoleon in Love,which Simon & Schuster has reprinted in hardback [$10.95].

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