Books: From Wilmington to Date

AMERICAN MEMOIR (433 pp.)—Henry Seidel Canby—Houghfon Mifflin ($5).

As a veteran editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, biographer of Thoreau and Whitman, and one of the original judges for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Henry Seidel Canby has been a proficient and even an eminent middleman of letters. His reflections about U.S. life & literati are noteworthy. This book includes two revised but previously published works—one on the '905, The Age of Confidence (1934), one on Yale (1936) and a newly composed section on U.S. literature. The author refers to himself as sensitive. He is...