Books: Crisis on Main Street

WHAT PEOPLE SAID—W. L. White— Viking ($2.75).

Nearly 20 years ago Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and a score of lesser authors made their reputations by dramatizing the deadly influence of Main Street's narrow, inhibited middle-class culture. What has been happening on Main Street in the last hardbreathing decade of boom and depression? The single serious attempt to find out has been Robert & Helen Lynd's brilliant sociological study, Middle town in Transition (TIME, April 19). On the surface, reported the Lynds, the cultural pattern of Main Street in 1935 appeared to be...