DOLLAR COTTON—John Faulkner—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).
"William Faulkner's younger brother" is not likely to be called that much longer. Forty-year-old John Faulkner has quite a South of his own, and his own way of telling about it. He knows how to give social history the easy clarity of a good comic strip, the human resonance of a good novel. His first book, Men Working (TIME, Aug. 11, 1941), was a tragicomedy about poor white farmers, brought to town and stranded there by WPA. Dollar Cotton is the life story of a Cotton King, Otis Town.
Otis Town's lust for land, and the wartime price of cotton, carried him from poverty to fantastic wealth and ruin, made assorted monsters of his wife and children, and left him in the end with a certain indestructible magnificence. It is the vivid history of Delta cotton and the people who raised it, from the day when they cleared the first land to the early '20s, when cotton let them down and the great Northern combines took over.
Wee Boy. When Otis Town left the Tennessee hills for the Delta, "the richest farming land since the discovery of the Nile Valley" was selling at 90¢ an acre. Town put every cent he had into 600 acres. Then he cleared the tremendous cane that towered 20 feet above him and walked the cotton seed into the reeking-rich earth. The next spring two Negroes, a man and a woman, shared his cabin, his labor, his prospects. They cleared and planted twice the past year's acreage. Settling up in the fall, Otis skinned the Negro so unmercifully that he drew a knife. Otis Town smashed in his skull with a singletree. Then he went to the cabin with a jar of vaseline and a piece of red ribbon, which he gave to the woman. Next winter, Mammy bore him a son and called him Wee Boy.
The day Otis Town cleared his fifth crop he sent his bride-to-be, a teacher back in the hills, her train fare and a dollar for emergencies. They were married the minute she stepped off the Doodlebug. The minute they got home, Otis Town hurried out to his fields. His wife bore him three children in three years, named them Loraine, Elaine, Otis Van Town Jr. Van looked like his father. The day Mrs. Town saw that he also looked like Wee Boy, she locked her door against "Mr. Town" and called him by that name only, from then on.
Year after year Otis Town added to his acreage with every cent he made or could borrow. By the time he had 12,000 acres the rest of the Delta had been bought up at $10 an acre. The latecomers called him Old Man Town, and Old Man Town set to work draining his sloughs and developing every clod he had.