Books: Eleventh-Hour Democrat

THE PROFESSOR—Rex Warner—Knopf ($2.50).

In The Wild Goose Chase, an imaginative first novel which perhaps deserved more readers than it got, Rex Warner wrote a modern allegory combining athletic prose, adventurous satire, thriller action. Less allegorical and more exciting, The Professor comes nearest to an English It Can't Happen Here, skids nearer plausibility than Sinclair Lewis' political goose-bumper.

The Professor is laid in an imaginary small country suggestive of Austria on the eve of Anschluss, Czecho-Slovakia on the eve of Munich. Professor A., greatest living authority on Sophocles, is a democrat who, in order to quell a riot of Fascist and Red students,...