Books: Red Father

KARL MARX—Franz Mehring—Covici, Friede ($5).

In 1836 a homesick, 18-year-old poet at the University of Berlin sent his sweetheart in his home town three exercise books filled with bad verse, which he soon afterward denounced as "all flat and formless in feeling; nothing natural about them; everything up in the air." The poet was Karl Heinrich Marx, stocky, dark-haired, active son of a well-to-do Jewish lawyer from the Rhineland town of Trier. His 22-year-old sweetheart was Jenny von Westphalen, close friend of his older sister, daughter of a highly-placed official whose family had...