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Still a housekeeper, wife and mother in spite of authorship, Julia Peterkin has little truck with literary haunts. Poet Carl Sandburg once paid her his supreme compliment when he called her the only writer he knew who was not a literary person. Tall and straight, redhaired, with a calm expression, a poised and kindly manner, Authoress Peterkin writes more now than she did but lives as much as ever on her South Carolina plantation. Other books: Black April, Bright Skin. Rascoe Preferred
PROMETHEANS—Burton Rascoe—Putnam ($2.75). Burton Rascoe is a journalist in search of literature. An epitome of restless 20th Century curiosity and enthusiasm, he has been a familiar U. S. literary figure for over ten years, has written masses of literary chatter but only three books. Prometheans is his fourth. Ever since he left Chicago (in 1920) he has been tinkering away at a novel which Author Branch Cabell calls "the most famous American novel never yet published." But Rascoe has been too busy nosing around among other people's works to finish his own. Prometheans, like his Titans of Literature published last year, is an enthusiastic notebook proclaiming the virtues of some of his favorites. St. Mark serves gusty Author Rascoe as a peg on which to hang his theory, already secondhand, that the real Jesus was a political zealot named Simon Bar Gi'ora, that the four Gospels were really an allegory of an unsuccessful Jewish revolt against Rome. Not Petronius Arbiter but his more rapscallion son, thinks Author Rascoe, was the author of the famed Satyricon, earliest picaresque novel. The neglected Lucian, great debunker of his day (2nd Century), he calls "the most modern of all writers of antiquity," compares him favorably with Anatole France, Bernard Shaw, H. L. Mencken. Though D. H. Lawrence "gives him the pip" in practical matters, on the whole he approves of him, allows him to stand with such fire-bringers as Aretino, Apideius, Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell.