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Among the scholarly biographies were several of major importance: Douglas Southall Freeman's third and fourth volumes of George Washington, Charles M. Wiltse's John C. Calhoun, Holman Hamilton's Zachary Taylor, and two first-rate Thomas Jeffersons: Dumas Malone's (the second volume of a work in progress) and Nathan Schachner's. In a year of political scandals, it was good to have books about two Americans whose personal integrity had survived their political careers: The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover and Merlo Pusey's Charles Evans Hughes.
Some of the year's best reading, though it sometimes seemed more like spying, showed up in collections of letters written by writers. John Keats, Henry Adams, Katherine Mansfield and Gustave Flaubert gave themselves away most successfully, but none surpassed the candor of that old confessed sinner, Nobel Prizewinner Andre Gide, in the fourth and last volume of his Journals, published just after his death. The life of Robert Louis Stevenson got a meticulously detailed going over from J. C. Furnas in Voyage to Windward, and a man and writer as unlike him as possible had all bumps and crotchets sensibly catalogued in Harry T. Moore's Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence.
One man of letters had some things to say about modern life that badly needed saying, but he found few U.S. listeners. In Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster spoke up for the final worth of personal relationships, human love, intellectual integrity and the importance of quality. But 20 or 30 times as many book buyers put their money on Gayelord Hauser's Look Younger, Live Longer, which stood near the top of the bestseller list for the second year in a row.
Poetry
No new poet raised an exciting voice during the year, but a few who had already proved their right to be heard spoke again. Wystan Hugh Auden, still incorrigibly witty but reaching toward wisdom at 44, fired a quotable broadside of satiric ideas in Nones. At 67, William Carlos Williams wound up his four-part poem, Paterson, a doctor-poet's crackling, diffuse commentary on the life he has observed in his corner of suburbia (Rutherford, N.J.). The publication of the Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats merely confirmed the indisputable fact that he was one of the greatest who ever used the language.
1951 BESTSELLERS
FICTION
From Here to Eternity, James Jones
The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk
Moses, Sholem Asch
Melville Goodwin, USA, John Marquand
The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
NON-FICTION
Washington Confidential, Jack Lait and
Lee Mortimer
The Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook
LIFE'S Picture History of Western Man
Look Younger, Live Longer, Gayelord Hauser
The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson