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By & large literature went to the wars in 1942, and came back looking more like journalism than literature. In the year's list of 9,000-odd titles, the center of gravity shifted more sharply than ever toward the topical and away from the monumental. For A.D. 1942 was a year in which men & women everywhere groped for moorings in the storm, for truths, for explanations, for consolations. A.D. 1942 was also a year of many defeats and readers wanted some talisman for victory. A.D. 1942, above all, was a year of discovery: the U.S., which had been essentially isolated if not isolationist, discovered the world through war.
Men & Death. The mind, like a trapped animal, sniffed and rooted for cause and cure in every frenzied corner of its predicament. The heart and the spirit, more intensely than at any previous time within this generation, turned upon the thought of death.
Of those who were nearest death and who survived it, few as yet were capable of saying much about it, and few ever would be. By far the most eloquent were those fragmentary statements of simple men which found their way occasionally into the news and into such volumes as The Raft, They Were Expendable and .Stanley Johnston's Queen of the Flattops ($3). Of the two attempts to give the experience permanence in words, neither was by an American. In Dialogue With Death the Hungarian Arthur Koestler's clinical notes on the subject of life & death were perhaps the maturest writing of the year. In Flight to Arras ($2.75), French Airman Antoine de St. Exupery gave the subject a treatment which was more daring, in certain mystical respects more profound, but which was also fogged with rhetoric and made dubious by the over-insistent preaching of a personal experience.
Men & Fellow Men. Without recent experience in either international intrigue or war, Americans groped for clues in the unhappy experiences of their fellow men.
There were plenty of nefarious experiences to be reviewed in Germany and Japan, there was surprising, deep-rooted strength in Russia, and there were worrisome problems elsewhere — and readers wanted to check these against the state of being at home:
> Top honors for German coverage went to youthful Howard K. Smith, whose Last 'Train from Berlin ($2.75) gave a detailed picture of gloomy conditions in the German capital following the first Nazi setbacks on the Russian front.
> On Japan, perhaps the most curious document was Japan's Dream of World Empire ($1.25), a dusting-off by Carl Crow of the Tanaka Memorial, notorious statement of anti-Chinese policy concocted in 1927 by aggressive Baron Tanaka.
Sad or angry notes on the same theme of Japanese ambition and ruling-class unscrupulousness were struck in With Japan's Leaders ($2.75), by onetime adviser to Japan's Washington Embassy Frederick Moore, and Government by Assassination ($3) by top-ranking New York Times Correspondent Hugh Byas. Other top-notchers on the Asiatic problem: Hallett Abend's Ramparts of the Pacific ($3.50), Pearl Buck's American Unity and Asia ($1.25), Nathaniel Peffer's Basis for Peace in the Far East ($2.50), George E. Tay lor's America in the New Pacific ($1.75).