Books: Pastures Still Green

LET THE BAND PLAY DIXIE—Roark Bradford—Harper ($2).

Roark Bradford has gone the late Joel Chandler Harris one better. Harris' classic Uncle Remus showed the Negro as storyteller, at one remove from his own concerns; in Bradford's tales Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit appear in their own black skins, without disguise. Negrophiles and educated Negroes may object that Author Bradford simplifies too much, sentimentalizes too often, but plain readers like his stories. Marc Connelley's The Green Pastures, founded on Bradford's first book, Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun, was the Broadway hit of 1930,...