THE LOVED AND THE UNLOVED (248 pp.) Thomas Hal PhillipsHarper ($3).
The practitioners of the sorghum and shotgun school of fiction usually start with two advantages: their general grimness, a quality of mind sympathetic to critics; the fact that they follow red clay paths already cleared for the public by William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. These advantages may make Southerner Phillips' fourth novel a success.
The hero is a sharecropper's son named Max Harper, a simple, violent, yet good-hearted fellow with a clubfoot. He falls in love with the landlord's daughter and develops an...