Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Collier, John - Iris Barry (review date 7 May 1933)

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Iris Barry (review date 7 May 1933)

SOURCE: Barry, Iris. “A Tomorrow Grown out of Today's Fears.” New York Herald Tribune Books (7 May 1933): 6.

[In the following review, Barry considers Full Circle to be a provocative book.]

This is no novel about the future, in the ordinary sense of that phrase. It is not compounded of Wellsian characters or situations, but of men like our neighbors, like Francis Bacon or General Marbot, in situations such as men have faced before. Suppose all is lost, since the economic pundits tell us all may so easily be lost, and civilization as we know it shattered to chaos, to the dark ages and worse again, to beyond the bronze age if you will—what then? Annihilate cities, tear down communication, destroy all material amenities: then let us look at these people of Mr. Collier's, a group of men and women roughly dressed in skins, furnished with a little metal and normal wits, entrenched in a stronghold...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Josiah Titzell (review date 5 April 1931)
   2. Dudley Carew (review date 5 May 1931)
   3. Herschel Brickell (review date 1931)
   4. Basil Bunting (review date August 1932)
   5. Rolfe Scott-Thomas (review date 20 October 1932)
   6. New Statesman and Nation (review date 12 November 1932)
   7. The Spectator (review date 18 November 1932)
   8. David Garnett (review date 8 April 1933)
   9. Iris Barry (review date 7 May 1933)
   10. John Cournos (review date 28 June 1933)
   11. Wyndham Lewis (review date 8 June 1934)
   12. William Rose Benét (review date 4 August 1934)
   13. The Nation (review date 8 August 1934)
   14. Fanny Butcher (review date 22 September 1934)
   15. C. J. Eustace (review date September 1934)
   16. Geoffrey West (review date 12 December 1934)
   17. Ben Ray Redman (review date 1 February 1941)
   18. Otis Ferguson (review date 3 February 1941)
   19. Paul Theroux (essay date 26 November 1972)
   20. New Republic (review date 9 December 1972)
   21. Jay Martin (review date 23 June 1973)
   22. John Updike (essay date 20 August 1973)
   23. Anthony Burgess (essay date 1973)
   24. Tom Milne (essay date spring 1976)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright