Books: The WP & A

MEN WORKING—John Faulkner—Harcourf, Brace ($2.50).

A remarkable first novel came out of the South this week, and the Jeeter Lesters, Ty Waldens, Snopes and Joads moved over to make room for a new family of U.S. literary Kallikaks — the Taylors. Its author: John Faulkner, younger brother of William Faulkner (Sanctuary and eleven other novels). The story: how the Taylors and their neighbors exchanged the certain poverty of sharecropping in Mississippi for the uncertainties of city life on the WPA.

Author Faulkner, a former WPA official, tells this shabby and pathetic tale with great...