Books: Nebraska Nonage

SPRING STORM—Alvin Johnson—Knopf ($2.50).

Last February onetime Professor George Santayana, 72, published his first novel (The Last Puritan—TIME, Feb. 3). Last week onetime Professor Alvin Johnson, 61, followed suit. But aside from their authors' profession, these two first novels had little in common. Spring Storm was not a novel of ideas but a simpleminded, affectionate tale of nonage in Nebraska. Though critics might well say the narrative creaked and that it was peopled by wooden marionettes out of Horatio Alger, they also found that its mixture of old-fashioned naivete and shrewdness had genuine...