1939 - Literature

Literature

Pocket Books, Inc. Americanizes the paperback revolution in publishing begun by Britain's Penguin Books in 1936. Having sent out 1,000 paperback copies of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth and 49,000 questionnaires to determine public interest, the new company founded by Robert F. (Fair) de Graff in partnership with Simon & Schuster puts out its first 10 reprints June 19, pricing them at 25¢ each: Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, five Shakespearean tragedies with an introduction by John Masefield, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, James Hilton's Lost Horizon, Thorne Smith's Topper, Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Dorothea Brande's self-help book Wake Up and Live, Dorothy Parker's collection of light verse Enough Rope, and Felix Salten's juvenile classic Bambi. Using enormous and fast new rubber-plate rotary presses that permit printing of paperbacks in large, economical quantities at a unit cost of pennies, the company pays artist Frank J. Lieberman $25 to create a bespectacled wallaby to use as a trademark, names it Gertrude, and goes on to turn out reprints of major and minor literary classics. Most authors, agents, and hardcover publishers agree to permit paperback reprints.

Kenyon Review begins publication at Kenyon College, in Ohio, under the direction of poet John Crowe Ransom, now 49, who left Vanderbilt 2 years ago to become professor of poetry at Kenyon. The literary quarterly will have a wide influence.

Nonfiction: Union Now by California-born New York Times League of Nations correspondent Clarence K. Streit, 43, who calls for the world's leading democratic nations to follow the example of the American colonies in 1787 and create a federal union to avoid war and economic depression; Church and State by Italian priest-political organizer Luigi Sturzo, now 67, who went into exile in October 1924 after opposing the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini; Language in Action by Canadian-born U.S. semanticist S. I. (Samuel Iehiye) Hayakawa, 33, whose lucid popularization will be retitled Language in Thought and Action; Coming Up for Air by George Orwell is a plea for the little man against big business; The New England Mind by Perry Miller, who corrects some long-held notions about the Puritans (a second edition will appear in 1953); Shakespeare's Boy Actors by Ontario-born London teacher and actor (William) Robertson Davies, 26, who joined the Old Vic company last year.

Fiction: Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, who writes in a style that most readers find inaccessible; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, whose novel is based on observations made while traveling with migrant farm families from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and produces a reaction almost comparable to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852; Johnny Got His Gun by Colorado-born novelist and screenwriter (James) Dalton Trumbo, 33, is a stream-of-consciousness account based on a story he has read of a British officer who lost his legs, arms, face, sight, and hearing in the Great War; The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, who portrays the moral degeneration of Hollywood where he has worked as a screenwriter since 1936; The Web and the Rock by the late Thomas Wolfe (Harper Bros. editor Edward Aswell will work his surviving mss. into two further novels); Night Rider by Kentucky-born novelist-poet Robert Penn Warren, now 34; Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; The Unknown Sea (Les Chemins de la mer) by François Mauriac; The Coup de Grace (Le Coup de Grâce) by Marguerite Yourcenar; Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood; How Green Was My Valley by Welsh-born British novelist Richard Llewellyn (Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd), 32; Mrs. Miniver by English novelist-poet Jan Struther (Joyce Mastone Anstruther Graham), 38; Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton; Love and Death by English novelist Llewelyn Powys, 55; On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen) by Ernst Jünger, whose allegorical novel is a protest against Germany's Nazis; Mister Johnson by Anglo-Irish novelist Joyce Cary, 51; After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley; The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White, who has adapted Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'arthur of the 15th century and begun a fictional quartet whose umbrella title will be The Once and Future King; Alberte (trilogy) by Norwegian novelist Cora Sandel (Jara Fabricius), 59; The Girls (Les Jeunes Filles) by Henri de Montherlant; Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller; Pale Horse, Pale Rider (stories) by Katherine Ann Porter; Night of the Poor by Frederic Prokosch; The Nazarene by Polish-born U.S. Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch, 59; "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber in the March 18 New Yorker; Wickford Point by John P. Marquand; Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden; Woman Diver (Ama) by Japanese novelist Yoko Ota, 36; The Story of an Old Geisha (Rogisho) and River Light (Kawa Akari) by Kanoko Okamoto; poet Akiko Yosano, now 61, publishes a new version of The Tale of Genji (Shinyaku Genji Monogatari) from 1015, translated into modern Japanese; The Outsider and Others (stories) by the late H. P. Lovecraft; "Marooned Off Vesta" by Russian-born New York science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, 29, appears in Amazing Stories magazine. An undergraduate at Columbia University, Asimov receives his bachelor's degree in biochemistry later in the year; Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston; Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver by J. Frank Dobie; Seasoned Timber by Dorothea Canfield Fisher; Overture to Death by Ngaio Marsh; Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Dimitrios in the United States); The Big Sleep by English-born U.S. detective novelist Raymond Thornton Chandler, 50, introduces the private eye Philip Marlowe.

Mystery writer S. S. Van Dine (Willard H. Wright) dies of a coronary thrombosis at his New York apartment April 11 at age 50; novelist Joseph Roth in exile at Paris May 27 at age 44; Ford Madox Ford at Deauville June 26 at age 65; Zane Grey at his Altadena, Calif., home October 23 at age 64; Llewelyn Powys of tuberculosis at Clavidel, Switzerland, December 2 at age 55.

Poetry: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot, who ceases publication of his 17-year-old literary quarterly Criterion because of paper shortages and the outbreak of war (see Stage Musicals [Cats], 1981); Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice; Here Lies by Dorothy Parker; "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden.

Poet-playwright William Butler Yeats dies at Roquebrunne (Alpes-Maritimes), France, January 28 at age 73 and is buried at Drucliffe, Sligo, as he requested in his poem "Under Ben Bulben"; Rose Hartwick Thorpe of 1870 "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight" fame dies at San Diego July 18 at age 89.

Juvenile: Madeline by Austrian-born New York illustrator-novelist Ludwig Bemelmans, 41, who illustrates his own work (which will outlive his new novel Hotel Splendide); Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton; Ben and Me by Robert Lawson (an account of Benjamin Franklin's life as told by his mouse, Amos).

Adventure writer Richard Halliburton, now 39, leaves Hong Kong in March aboard the 75-foot motorized junk Sea Dragon en route to San Francisco, but the ship and all aboard her disappear in a typhoon the night of March 23 some 2,400 miles west of Midway Island.