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Sinclair Lewis, whose novel, Cass Timberlane, will not be on the bookstands for four months, already counted a tidy author's take—from movie rights, magazine-serial payment and publisher's advance royalties—adding up to $400,000.
John S. Sumner, foremost U.S. anti-sinner, reported happily on what he had protected the public from. Confiscated last season by his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice: 37,002 books and pamphlets, 23,818 pictures and postcards, 12,900 "circulars, catalogues, etc.," 24,293 "immoral" odds" & ends.
E. B. White, humorous writer for the New Yorker, was saluted with a rapturous, humorless, ten-column kiss in the New York Times by Clifton Fadiman, ex-New Yorker book reviewer: "This . . . will embarrass Mr. White. . . . There is some danger that he will be considered a minor writer. . . . E. B. White is a major writer. . . . [He is] one of the most useful political thinkers in this country. . . ."
Affairs of State
Eleanor Roosevelt, in her newspaper column, turned U.S. Communists over her knee: "We feel kindly toward the Soviet people. [But] American Communists who encourage a policy of world revolution have done the peace of the world harm. . . . Now . . . they are out 10 force Communism on our Democracy. That we will not tolerate."
Lady Nancy Astor made personal history of a sort in the House of Commons by making a soft answer. When Laborite Aneurin Bevan called her an "old gas bag," the normally tart-tongued Viscountess said, "Oh, dear."
Winston Churchill, according to his physician, Lord Moran, is regarded by Joseph Stalin as "a broth of a boy." The 70-year-old Prime Minister's physician explained: "Stalin doesn't like a man who lives on nuts and soda water."