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Riffraff & Anger. Working at his own pace and indebted to no literary model, Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren produced, in The Man with the Golden Arm, the best U.S. novel of the year. A tender but clear-eyed story about Chicago's slum riffraff, it proved that no human materials, however tawdry, are outside a good writer's reach. A. B. Guthrie showed again in his second book, The Way West, that the historical novel need not be tied to the tired old formulas of bodice-and-battle period pieces. The best first novel of the year was Artist Tom Lea's story about Mexican bullfighters, The Brave Bulls. More interesting and accomplished, but not so appealing, was Paul Bowles's impressive first novel, The Sheltering Sky, about a despair-ridden pair of U.S. intellectuals going to pot in North Africa. Two good books clearly written from the heart were Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn, a warm, gentle story about Kentucky hill folk, and Morton Thompson's The Cry and the Covenant, an angry, compassionate biographical novel about Hungarian Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered the cause of childbed fever. Among the year's volumes of collected short stories, The Golden Apples, by Stylist Eudora Welty, stood in a class of its own. These stories of the South had a unity of mood and place that put the group just behind the best novels of the year. Truman Capote, last year's white-haired boy-with-bangs, showed no advance over his precocious but overrated talents in A Tree of Night and Other Stories. From Nigel Dennis, an Englishman who had lived for 15 years in the U.S., came A Sea Change, a crisp, flashing satire on professional liberals. Easily one of the bestwritten books of 1949, A Sea Change impressed critics in both the U.S. and England but failed to find the audience it deserved, perhaps because in fiction, as in life, paid liberals make predictable gestures and meet predictable ends.