Schuyler Green (the hero of this Grade-A tract ["Gentleman's Agreement"], which Mrs. Hobson has cleverly camouflaged as a novel) is a crusading writer for Smith's Magazine…. Schuyler, after he has reluctantly taken over the assignment [of writing a series of articles on anti-Semitism], leaps into harness with all his heart and soul…. [Since] he is unknown in New York, he prepares for the present series by taking a flat in walk-up Bohemia, and pretending to be Jewish—the only way to encompass his problem at first hand….

When he turns in the last article (and signs a book contract with an enterprising publisher) he has run the familiar gamut, discovered a great deal about the innate savagery of his fellowman and a great deal about himself as well. It begins with his fiancée, a lip-service liberal who applauds his approach to his material—but who can't quite refrain from checking on that Episcopalian background once again. (p. 5)

There's more in the same vein, and Mrs. Hobson manages it all with brilliance and dispatch: a taut description of a contretemps in a night club; a slick evasion of fundamentals at a Connecticut week-end, which the author identifies far too precisely for comfort; the inevitable howls of the wolf-cubs as they close in on Schuyler's son. In the end, of course, the series is a slam-bang success and the hero's fiancée redeems herself—in a way that seemed particularly unfortunate to this reviewer.

But this dénouement, like the whole book, is something that each reader should sample for himself. "Gentleman's Agreement" is honest—even when its plot is most flagrantly thimble-rigged. Its polemics are far better than its probing of the verities; but it is still required reading for every thoughtful citizen in this parlous century. "It might not be the American century after all," says Mrs. Hobson, in one of those editorial asides that somehow seem to crowd out most of the narrative, "or the Russian century, or the atomic century. Perhaps it would be the century that broadened and implemented the idea of freedom, all the freedoms. Of all men." Current headlines hardly seem to bear her out, but she has every right to hope. (pp. 5, 36)