Books: Cracked Crackers

GOD'S LITTLE ACRE—Erskine Caldwell —Viking ($2.50).

Though no disturbance was reported last week at Brooklyn's Evergreen Cemetery, by rights Anthony Comstock should have been spinning like a teetotum in his grave. Viking Press issued the kind of book that was like a call of boots & saddles to the old vice crusader. Erskine Caldwell is a newcomer to the Viking list, a young author of the leftwing, hard-boiled school of U. S. fiction. Queer mixtures of Rabelaisian spade-calling, bell laughter and poetic proletarianism, God's Little Acre luridly illustrates two present-day intelligentsiac trends: towards...