For reasons ranging from purest merit to merest popularity, ten books stood head & shoulders above the madding crowd in 1942:
The Raft, by Robert Trumbull ($2.50), and They Were Expendable, by W. L. White ($2), came closest to catching the adventure of war without scooping up too much of its bitter dross.
Conditions of Peace, by Edward Hallett Carr ($2.50), a highly intelligent study of the elements necessary to set up a stable post-war world, was the nearest thing to required reading.
Victory Through Airpower, by Alexander de Seversky ($2.50), of all the books grinding special axes of war, was the most provocative, the clearest, the most popular and in ways the most exaggerated.
The Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers ($2.50), was the exciting story of escape from a German concentration camp and of the nature of those from whom the escapist seeks help.
Dialogue With Death, by Arthur Koestler ($2), was a description of the thoughts and actions of a man (Koestler himself) condemned to death in a Fascist prison.
The Seed Beneath the Snow, by Ignazio Silone ($2.75), was a searching, spiritual novel written around the lives of villagers in contemporary Italy.
Admiral of the Ocean Sea, by Samuel Eliot Morison (2 vols., $10), was a biography of Columbus by the distinguished man who has been named by the U.S. Navy to write its official history of the war.
Victor Hugo, by Matthew Josephson ($3-50), filled — with 514 eminently readable pages—a gaping hole in U.S. biographical writing.
Parts of a World, by Wallace Stevens ($2), stood with the finest published poems of the year.
During the year: > Many writers, some despairing of interpreting war during a war, found themselves in uniform. Among them: Novelists James Gould Cozzens, Julian Green, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Knight, F. Van Wyck Mason; Playwrights Sidney Kingsley, Thornton Wilder, Laurence Stallings, William Saroyan; Poets Christopher La Farge, Karl Jay Shapiro, Harry Brown; ex-New Yorkers John Cheever, Geoffrey Hellman, Edward Newhouse; Autobiographer Vincent Sheean; Historian Samuel Eliot Morison; Newshawks Jimmy Cannon, Marion Hargrove, Hartzell Spence.
> Less directly involved in war, but caught in its vortex, were Novelist-Biographer Stefan Zweig, dead by his own hand in Brazilian exile ("The artist has been wounded in his concentration. . . ."); sensationalist Richard Julius Herman Krebs (alias Jan Valtin, hero of under-coverman Krebs's 1941 best-seller Out of the Night), imprisoned by the Justice Department for deportation to Germany at war's end; Author Waldo ("I love Argentina. . . .") Frank, who gave a repeat performance of the mauling he received in Kentucky's Harlan County in 1932 by getting attacked by young Fascists in Buenos Aires.
> Apart from war casualties in 1942, the following went to their deaths: Historian Guglielmo Ferrero; French journalist and political theorist Count Raoul de Roussy de Sales (The Making of Tomorrow); Poet William Alexander Percy, whose prose work Lanterns on the Levee was one of 1941's most substantial contributions to American letters; Poet Alan Porter; dog-lover Albert Payson Terhune; popular Novelists Rachel Field, Alice Hegan Rice, Alice Duer Miller (The White Cliffs).