Books: Dark Twain

THERE WERE No HEROES—George W. Ogden—Dodd, Mead ($2).

George Washington Ogden is an oldtime newspaperman (born 1871) who has written westerns (Whiskey Trail, Windy Range, etc.) and whose verse was once reprinted in the old Literary Digest. There Were No Heroes, which he subtitles "A Personal Record of a Man's Beginning," is unlike anything he ever tried before. It is too bad that he did not turn his hand to such serious writing decades ago.

By far the best of the book is its first half: a bleak, sharp-eyed, sensitive account of what the world was like to a boy on a cruelly...