Fiction: Recent Books: Dec. 27, 1937

• Share

THE HURRICANE'S CHILDREN—Carl Carmer—Farrar & Rinehart ($2). Collection of 20 freshly-collected U. S. folk tales, interspersed with roaring prose poems, about the tall doings of such giant standbys as Paul Bunyan, such lesser-known U. S. genii as Ichabod Paddock and Kemp Morgan, a Nebraska newcomer named Febold Feboldsen.

Woodcuts

VERTIGO—Lynd Ward—Random House ($3). Woodcutter Lynd Ward's fourth and most straightforward picture-novel (others: Gods' Man, Mad Man's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage). Proletarian victims are a boy and girl from Manhattan's slums; Capitalist villain, an old man somewhat reminiscent of the late John D. Rockefeller.

Non-Fiction

FROM THESE ROOTS—Mary M. Colum —Scribner ($2.50). Twelve essays, discussing writers as far apart as Flaubert and Thomas Wolfe, linked together by an analysis of "the ideas that have made modern literature"; the work of a seasoned, conservative critic whose writing is always lucid and shrewd, sometimes (as in her comments on "the despair of the modern world") eloquent, powerful, exact.

A MEMOIR OF AE—John Eglinton—Macmillan ($3.50). Simple, direct, sometimes moving, biographical essay on the late George William Russell, whose career as a distinguished Irish poet ran parallel to his less happy life as an ardent, unpractical, outspoken politician.