Books: Yankee Clown

TIMOTHY DEXTER REVISITED (306 pp.) —John P. Marquand—Little, Brown ($6.50).

J. P. Marquand's last book is not a novel, but it is only his novelist's hand that saves it from being merely a literary curiosity. Good family boy that he was, Marquand never lost his gossip's and antiquarian's interest in the past of Newburyport, Mass., a place that was never long out of his thoughts in fact or in fiction. In 1925, before he had written anything better than hack historicals, he dusted off some old documents, ran down some dubious legends and wrote...