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Packages. It was a good year for anthologies, a better one still for popular dictionaries. American Harvest ($3.50), edited by Allen Tate and John Peale Bishop, proved that many U.S. contemporaries have achieved a broad and respect able mastery of literature's one sure preservative: form. In properly honoring formal accomplishment, the editors were inclined to undervalue literary vitality. A Treasury of the Familiar ($5), edited by Ralph L. Woods, usefully disregarded taste and value in favor of collating hundreds of literary tags, good, bad & in different, which lie, on the literate tongue, just between tantalizing half-memory and ready reference. H. L. Mencken's A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources ($7.50) was as rich a book for ruminators as the year brought; and The American Thesaurus of Slang ($5), edited by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark, came about as near completely corralling the living, dead and deathless in native idiom as could be humanly expected of one volume. The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music ($3.95) was the most comprehensive book of its kind ever assembled.
Biographies. Bulkiest biography published in 1942 was Douglas Southall Freeman's massively academic Lee's Lieutenants ($5), first of a projected three-volume study of the men who fought the battles of the South's lost cause. Most amusing was Hesketh Pearson's G.B.S. A Full Length Portrait ($3.50), which recorded many unfamiliar details of George Bernard Shaw's childhood and lovelife. Others were Esther Forbes's conscientious, overlong Paul Revere and the World He Lived In ($3.75); Hugh 1'Anson Fausset's erratic but illuminating Walt Whitman ($3); Poetess Muriel Rukeyser's fervent celebration of the famously forgotten great man of science Willard Gibbs ($3.50) ; Franz Werfel's Verdi: the Man in His Letters ($3.50).
Look Homeward Angels. Close to the contemporary U.S. were two roughly similar books by two totally dissimilar writers — Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' best-selling Cross Creek ($2.50), Essayist E. B. White's sane and salty One Man's Meat ($2.50). Ludwig Bemelmans, a first-rate light storyteller with a surpassing light style, criticized human foibles with a sweet smile in I Love You, I Love You, I Love You ($2.50). But it remained for Humorist James Thurber, reporting on A.D. 1942!s general state of affairs in My World — And Welcome to It ($2.50), to pay the year off most succinctly and devastatingly. "Man," he said, "would seem to be slowly slipping back to all fours."
FOR CHILDREN
(Ages 3-8)
The Little House — Virginia Lee Burton ($1.75).
The Man Who Lost His Head— Claire Huchet Bishop ($1).
Watch the Pony Grow— William Hall ($1).
The Tall Book of Mother Goose —Feodor Rojankovsky ($1).
(Ages 8-12)
Herodia, the Lovely Puppet — Katherine Milhous ($2).
Tree in the Trail — Holling Clancy Holling ($2.50).
The Doll Who Came Alive— Enys Tregarthen ($2).
Snow Treasure — Marie McSwigan ($2)
(Ages 12-16)
Ludwig Beethoven and the Chiming Tower Bells— Opal Wheeler ($2).
Adam of the Road — Elizabeth Janet Gray ($2).
America Sings — Carl Carmer ($3).