FICTION: Flatland Dreamer

SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY—Dawn Powell—'Brentano ($2.50). There is a theory, which many U. S. writers and critics clasp tightly in their teeth, that the Great American Novel will come, like young Lochinvar, out of the Great Middle West. As a result, the saga of Gopher Prairie has been rewritten backward, forward, and on the head of a pin. In its latest form it is the story, mainly, of Dorrie Shirley, a sensitive little girl who had a warm disposition, a prim and unsympathetic sister called Linda, and a grandmother called "Aunt Jule," who...