Books: The Year in Books, Dec. 19, 1949

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thinking, mor als and religion could rescue the nation from a school-fostered age of adolescence. During the year, atomic jitters had first given way to resignation, then to calm stocktaking. Incomparably the best and most common-sensical book was Scientist Vannevar Bush's challenging and hopeful Modern Arms and Free Men. Genuflections by the great made U.S. readers take two great men seriously, but the enthusiasm was as forced as it was deserved. To the bicentennial homage paid Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was added a spate of books about him, most of them quickies, few of them eagerly bought. Humanitarian (and Goethe scholar) Al bert Schweitzer fared only slightly better in the bookshops. Theirs was not the kind of greatness that courted popularity comfortably. Good of their kind, in this or any year, were: William Beebe's High Jungle, a re port on researches in Venezuela by the best living writer among naturalists; The Story of Maps, Cartographer Lloyd A. Brown's readable survey about a neglected subject, again remarkably well-written; and as a sheer reading experience, some times tickling, sometimes infuriating, H. L. Mencken's fat roundup of dicta and dogma, A Mencken Chrestomathy.

POETRY AND CRITICISM No new poet of stature broke into print, and those of known talent coaxed their muse in silence. Man of the year, as he has been to most U.S. readers of poetry for many years, was Robert Frost, hale and 74, whose Complete Poems only formally reaffirmed his size. Worth the effort it took to read them were the Collected Poems of Englishman William Empson, whose passive philosophy of life was expressed in verse that sometimes went off like fireworks. There was little U.S. literary criticism worth the time of readers who cared for literature and respected the creative impulse. The best book of the year in its field was British Professor F. R. Leavis' The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, a. study whose depth and discrimination made most critics aware of their meager equipment. The year was rich in literary biographies and collections of literary correspondence. New letters of Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Shelley and even Henry VIII were turned up, but not even close students of the writers found in them any cause for new evaluations. Most fortunate in his biographer was Charles Dickens, who profited by Hesketh Pearson's lively interest in Dickens: His Character, Comedy & Career. In The Universe of G.B.S., George Bernard Shaw finally got a good calm look from a biographer, Professor William Irvine, who liked and respected but wasn't afraid of him. A much more worshipful look passed from Charles Tennyson to grandfather Alfred in Alfred Tennyson. Famed Milton Scholar James Holly Hanford's longtime labor, John Milton, Englishman, was an able and balanced but somewhat pedantic biography of the powerful, troubled poet. The keenest job of literary detective work was Howard Vincent's The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, a book that explained how Melville converted a brisk whaling yarn into a U.S. classic. And standing alone among the translations of not one but many years was Samuel Putnam's truly creative restoration of Cervantes' Don Quixote.