Books: Lions & Cubs

THE THIN RED LINE (495 pp.)—James Jones—Scribners ($5.95).

BIG SUR (241 pp.)—Jack Kerouac—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.50).

America's once promising crop of young postwar writers has so far shown no knack at all for growing old great-fully. Critics, casting about for the causes of failed promise, justly note a complex of external factors: the loss of old, stable values once held in common between readers and writer; the absence of a society sufficiently established to provide the potential novel ist with a rich background of mores and customs for his characters. But much of the...