Books: Belmar's Delmar

KEPT WOMAN—Vina Delmar—Earcourt, Brace ($2.50).

The Bronx, New York City's northernmost borough, famed for bourgeois baby carriages, walkups and dingy streets, was fairly immune to litterateurs until Mrs. Vina Delmar began to leer in its direction. The result of her first leer she sold for about $60 to Snappy Stories, brisk woodpulp fiction monthly. Thereafter her Bronx first-novel Bad Girl, was wreathed by the Literary Guild, and, like later Delmar books, was read by millions.—

In Kept Woman Authoress Delmar again looks at Bronx domesticity, makes the colloquial-trivial often seem tragic. The...