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Veteran William Faulkner was still mapping the deep, dark South, this time with Intruder in the Dust, a novel whose tangled threads of murder, racial hatred and nocturnal conspiracy, wound together in his elaborate, strongly colored prose, made some critics tear their hair and others hail it as Faulkner's (and 1948's) finest. Disappointing (after All the King's Men) were Robert Penn Warren's short stories, The Circus in the Attic, which made the South's decayed mansion duller than tragic. In Other Voices, Other Rooms, a newcomer named Truman Capote indulged in another preoccupation of Southern writers (sexual abnormality), and convinced even his detractors that his prose was talented as well as purple.
In general, it was not a year in which the older novelists made their reputations securer. Ernest Hemingway's long-awaited new novel was still in his typewriter; John Dos Passos' was due to appear next month. Thornton Wilder's Ides of March, an imaginary document built around the assassination of Julius Caesar, was a scholarly tour de force and not quite successful. John Steinbeck (The Pearl) and Erskine
Caldwell (This Very Earth) showed again that their best was undoubtedly behind them—and so, to a lesser degree and with much more polish, did Aldous Huxley (Ape and Essence) and W. Somerset Maugham (Catalina). In Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann proved that he alone remained to uphold the fallen standards of the great German tradition; his restatement of Marlowe's and Goethe's great theme was anything but easy reading, but its best passages were remarkably good.
Imported Goods. Europe's yield showed some of her well-known novelists at the top of their bent and introduced some highly talented strangers and newcomers. Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, which made a new evaluation of that much neglected virtue, human pity, became deservedly one of the most discussed books of the year—along with The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's most unpitying, inhumanly humorous assault on Hollywood's attitude—and, by implication, the American attitude—toward love and death. Two other British writers at last got a foothold in the U.S.: Joyce Gary, with his fine, psychologically tuned Herself Surprised, and I. Compton-Burnett, whose dully brilliant Bullivant and the Lambs showed clearly why she has become one of England's most antiquated but most distinguished novelists.
Other noteworthy books from the British Isles included Humphrey Slater's Conspirator, a political spy novel whose unlagging melodrama was both its triumph and defeat (it never paused to look below the surface), Jon Godden's story of human loneliness, The House by the Sea and two excellent collections of short stories: Frank O'Connor's The Common Chord, which showed its Irish author in high form, and 31-year-old A. L. Barker's Innocents, studies of far-from-innocent English children that reminded some critics of Richard Hughes.