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Persons and Places, by George Santayana, is the famed philosopher's unfinished autobiography. It tells of his boyhood in Spain and the tragic loneliness of his Spanish family in alien Boston, with a very brief account of his years at Harvard—a stoic recital of intellectual hardships written with epicurean felicity.
Joseph the Provider, by Thomas Mann, is the final volume of Mann's story of Joseph which tells in 2,005 pages what the Bible version tells in 21 pages. It contains Mann's usual solid, overlong discussions of history, religion and art, but its portraits of Pharaoh and Jacob are characterizations that the great novelist has never excelled.
U.S. War Aims, by Walter Lippmann, is the popular pundit's realistic appraisal of the weaknesses of U.S. foreign policy (or of its lack of a consistent policy). It advocates U.S. alliance with Britain and Russia and eventually with China.
Yankee from Olympus, by Catherine Drinker Bowen, a biography of Chief Justice Holmes, remained on the list of popular books all year by virtue of the wisdom, the knowledge of law, the humor and the span of American history embodied in its hero.
Anna and the King of Siam, by Margaret Landon, is a digest and condensation of the writings of Anna Leonowens, an English officer's widow who in 1862 was hired to teach English to the Siamese monarch's numerous wives and children. Always interesting and sometimes charming, it is surprisingly unsensational for a story of life in a harem.
Merit Unrewarded. Not all good books of 1944 won the public they deserved. Friedrich A. Hayek's brilliant exposition of the perils of collectivism, The Road to Serfdom, Hans Kohn's timely historical study, Idea of Nationalism, and Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal's profound analysis of the U.S. Negro problem, An American Dilemma, won high critical praise but comparatively few readers. And much of the year's most intelligent poetry suffered the usual neglect: W. H. Auden's For the Time Being, E. E. Cummings' I X I, Robert Fitzgerald's A Wreath for the Sea, Marianne Moore's Nevertheless. But 1944 also witnessed the emergence of a new popular poet of high quality. Russell Davenport's My Country, a simple, eloquent, sometimes patriotically overcharged paean to American destiny. ran up the astonishing (for poetry) printing total of 30,000 copies.
War books from the fighting fronts appeared steadily; they were generally competent, rarely outstanding. Among the favorites after Ernie Pyle's homespun anthologies; Jack Belden's frank, often bitter Still Time to Die; Target: Germany, the admirable, official story of the Eighth U.S.A.A.F. ; Captain Herbert L. Merillat's detailed report of the battle for Guadalcanal, The Island; Charles Wertenbaker's Invasion! For warmly personal reasons, Mina Curtiss' Letters Home, 254 samples of the billions of letters that U.S. service men have written home since they went to war, became a public favorite.