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Merits and Morals. Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, a heartfelt story of South African racial problems, was admired as much for its merits as for its morals. So was the strangest parable of the year: Ernst Juenger's On the Marble Cliffs (published in Germany in 1939), in which, under a cunning mythological disguise, a talented former disciple of Hitler had denounced the Führer and all his works. In World Without Visa, a story of Marseille under the Vichy regime, France's Jean Malaquais wrote. perhaps the year's best political novel.
But the cream of the novels from the Continent was unquestionably Albert Camus' The Plague, a study of human behavior in the face of death,-Readers might justly disdain the gabby slickness of The Chips Are Down, Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist novel; but in Camus (often regarded as one of existentialism's fellow travelers, though he denies it), they could recognize the true novelist's capacity for translating philosophy and faith into the vigorous language of human conduct.
NON-FICTION
As World War II receded, its outline seemed to become clearer—in non-fiction as in fiction. First had come the journalists—putting down history on the run. Now came the participants with their memoirs. Though the.r reticences and their partisanship inevitably left plenty of work for the future historian, the generals and the statesmen were responsible for some of this year's best books.
Most valuable of tlie books on the shooting war itself was General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, a lucid account of Allied strategy, written in serviceable Service English. To be assured of just how good it was, readers had only to turn to Field Marshal Montgomery's soldierly but dry-as-dust Normandy to the Baltic, which covered much of the same ground as Crusade. There were official and semi-official Service histories by the score, but the best to set beside Ike's book were Fletcher Pratt's expert, well-written and exciting The Marines' War and Professor Samuel Eliot Morison's The Rising Sun in the Pacific, third volume of his comprehensive history of the U.S. Navy in World War II.
Two books helped to explain Germany's military collapse from the German side: Defeat in the West, by Milton Shulman, a former Canadian intelligence officer, and The German Generals Talk, by British Captain B. H. Liddell Hart. Both concluded that the German army's biggest handicap in the field was Adolf Hitler's personal direction of the war. Of special interest and excellent of their kind were A. D. Divine's Dunkirk, a brilliant recording of the cross-Channel rescue of Britain's beaten army in 1940, and Memoirs of a Secret Agent of Free France by Remy (Gilbert Renault), the most exciting story of espionage in World War II.
Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm was the first dramatic volume of what promises to be a great history of the war and Churchill's stewardship. Best of such U.S. books was Dramatist Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins, perhaps too worshipful of both men, but the clearest view yet of the war at the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin level. Overshadowed by these two, but important for the record, were The Memoirs of Cordell Hull and Henry L. Stimson's On Active Service in Peace and War.