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Captains & Gamy Confessions. It was true again in 1950, as in almost every recent year, that the readers of history and biography had the best pickings. Lloyd Lewis died with only one volume of his biography of General Ulysses S. Grant completed, but Captain Sam Grant was a fine, thorough book, the best job ever done on Grant's early years. Another big job done with care and spirit was Margaret Coit's John C. Calhoun: American Portrait, a sympathetic and fair study of the great diehard South Carolinian. Catherine Drinker Bowen put too much fictional gloss on solid John Adams and the American Revolution, but it was the first biography to make him seem wholly human. Irving Brant finished the third volume of his massive James Madison, and William Harlan Hale wrote a fresh, readable Horace Greeley.
Roosevelt in Retrospect was a fast, typical John Gunther look at F.D.R.; Louis Fischer looked longer at Gandhi but had more trouble trying to tell what he thought he saw, in his slogging, monotonous Life of Mahatma Gandhi. One of the year's best biographies was Amy Kelly's scholarly and readable Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings; another was Yale Professor Roland Bainton's exhaustive life of Protestant Martin Luther, Here I Stand. Louise Hall Tharp, a writing housewife, dared to try a delicate job and brought it off successfully in a spirited three-woman biography, The Peabody
Sisters of Salem. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas told his own off-the-bench story in Of Men and Mountains, one of the most satisfying self-portraits of the year. From another century and another kind of man came Boswell's London Journal, a gamy confession that many readers tackled with more relish than they ever had for Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.
Historians went on doing solid work, but the year's big launching was Princeton's first volume of its projected 52-volume The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Allan Nevins completed his two-volume Emergence of Lincoln, which examined as if for the first time the crucial years 1857-61. Stewart Holbrook had the fine idea of tracking down the pioneers whose home towns were in New England, and produced a fascinating piece of Americana in The Yankee Exodus, while John Bakeless reproduced the look of the country as its first explorers saw it in The Eyes of Discovery. Civil War fans got their richest informal serving in years in Henry Steele Commager's The Blue and the Gray, a feast of documentary evidence from actual participants on both sides, military and civilian.
From U.S. writers, there were few outstanding literary biographies, little notable poetry and even less first-rate literary criticism. Newton Arvin's Herman Melville was the best critical study of the year, brief, intelligent and splendidly informed; Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials was a good, stimulating collection of minor pieces by the best of U.S. working critics. Poet Robert Frost was much honored, but no poetry was published that promised a likely successor to him. Carl Sandburg's Complete Poems contained 72 newly collected ones that showed the same minstrel's virtues and poetic limitations of his earliest work.