Books: An American Storyteller

(See Cover)

Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty:

Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master—

Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick

In a carpenter's loft in a street of that April city.

Thus Poet Archibald MacLeish recalls one of the great American writers in his days of early glory, back in the 1920s, when it always seemed to be April in Paris. Last week Ernest Hemingway was a long way from Paris and a long way from April. He was 55, but he looked older. He cruised in a black and...