Books: Evil in Our Time

MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY—Edmund Wilson—Doubleday ($2.50).

Critic Edmund Wilson's first book of fiction since I Thought of Daisy (1929) is the first event of the year which can be described as "literary." For it is more & more unusual for U.S. writers to try to produce literature which is serious without solemnity, entertaining without shallowness, intelligent without owlishness, socially observant without being dogmatically vindictive, morally acute without being mealymouthed.

Among the six stories in this book are a study of the dead hand of the past on a living person; a study of the...