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Further from the Furnace. Most of the year's novelists worked a little further from the furnace, but many of their pages were warm with essential relevance. The Song of Bernadette ($3) was an act of piety inspired by Franz Werfel's escape from the Nazis. In his somewhat faltering The New Day ($3) Jules Remains examined Communism during that time, two decades ago, when much of Europe did its reading by that "great light in the East." In Dragon's Teeth ($3) Upton Sinclair fed his kind-hearted historical marathonists into the champing maws of Herren, Hitler, Göring and Goebbels. With Josephus and the Emperor ($2.75) Lion Feuchtwanger concluded his Roman yet topical trilogy on the amphibian difficulties of the international Jew.
To Conrad Richter, in his novel of Arizona in the early 1900s, Tacey Cromwell ($2), fell the privilege of saying more in 208 pages than most novelists manage in 1,000. In his novel about lawyers, The Just and the Unjust ($2.50), James Gould Cozzens tried to create an organic image of U.S. democracy in practice, and achieved one of the season's most interesting disappointments. In Go Down, Moses ($2.50), a complex novel disguised as seven stories, William Faulkner tried to capture for non-Fascists some of the more fiber-building meanings of the words "blood" and "soil." In Only One Storm ($2.75) Granville Hicks tried to write the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the more humorless type of leftist liberals and managed, inadvertently, to write their Tobacco Road. With his second novel Dollar Cotton ($2.50), John Faulkner lost the odd, suspect comic impetus of Men Working but continued to carve out a South distinct from his brother's and one worth cultivating.
The most interesting debutante was Gladys Schmitt, whose The Gates of Aulis ($2.75) was an arduously written, passionately ambitious, very gifted and inadequate attempt to focus the death-drives of a pathic world within the trouble of some provincial U.S. intellectuals. In The Company She Keeps ($2.50) Mary McCarthy betrayed various friends & foes of the literary-leftish '30s, herself, her cold considerable talent for psychosocial analysis, and the considerable limitations of that talent. All but neglected by the public was another first novel by a woman, Rose Kuszmaul, whose Nobody's Children ($2.50), a simple, striking study of boys in an orphans' home, rated with the best novels of the year.
Popular Fiction. Of the popular novels Howard Fast's The Unvanquished ($2.50) was best, in its straightforward brevity, rare in historical novels, and in its startling attempt to portray George Washington as if he might actually have lived.
Paper & Poetry Shortage. The aggregate title pages of the year's harvest of escape fiction would doubtless have sufficed to print all the year's poetry worth perpetuating, but that did not mean that all of it was printed. Edna Millay's The Murder of Lidice (60¢), a somewhat less indestructible monument to that village than was its own destruction, had no trouble finding a publisher. Notable were an Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry ($3.50) edited by Dudley Fitts, and a striking volume of poems, Awake! ($1.50), by young Ulsterman W. R. Rodgers.