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The best new work of veteran novelists was Glenway Wescott's Apartment in Athens, a harrowing story about Nazi-occupied Greece, and. John Marquand's brief, tender war-story, Repent in Haste.
Foreign and expatriate novelists contributed a handful of books most of which were more earnest, if not much better, than the domestic brands. Among them:
Hercules, My Shipmate, Robert Graves' salty re-rendering of the Argonaut tale; Days and Nights, Konstantine Simonov's bulky, spirited Russian war novel; Rick-sliaw Boy, Lau Shaw's sentimental story of life in the Chinese proletariat (Book-of-the-Month Club choice for August); The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch's massive attempt to resuscitate the Augustan era; The Wind Is Rising, twelfth volume of Jules Remains' immense Men of Good Will—who began to shiver in the draught of the 1920's rising fascism; The Ballad and the Source, Rosamond Lehman's study of a woman of the world as seen through adolescent eyes.
The best of these books, and probably the year's best novel, was Britisher Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet, a crisp close-up of life in a British movie studio.* This book sold out its first edition within ten days of publication. Piped Isherwood's astonished publishers: "These are fantastic days in the book world!"
There were some notable reprints:
The Bostonians, Henry James' long-neglected novel about the late 19th Century reformers and bluestockings; The Short Stories of Henry James, selected and edited (with a commentary on each story) by Critic Clifton Fadiman; Is He Popenjoy?, one of Anthony Trollope's gayest novels and Barchester Towers (reprinted by Doubleday Doran at $10, with illustrations); The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald's most popular novel; All Trivia, a new, revised edition by Logan Pearsall Smith (TIME, Dec. 10).
The fiction curiosity of the year was Stephen Hero, the first version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which James Joyce rejected as inadequate, but which might have made a lesser novelist's great novel.
* For news of Isherwood, from Isherwood, see LETTERS.