Books: Strange Fruit

THE SLEEP OF BABY FILBERTSON (190 pp.) —James Leo Herlihy—Dutton ($3.50).

In the passage from Winesburg, Ohio which James Leo Herlihy takes for his text, Sherwood Anderson remarks that the unmarketable apples that the pickers disdain to harvest are actually choice: "Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples." But times have changed since Anderson's masterpiece appeared in 1919. Nowadays it is precisely the twisted fruits of humanity—as plucked from the tree of American life by such as Eugene O'Neill, Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams—that command the commercial market, leaving the rosy, chubby ones to go hang. Indeed. Author Herlihy...