November 1947
In This Issue
Explore the November 1947 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Atomic War or Peace
Movies in America: After Fifty Years
The Editor's Choice
Following his graduation from Groton and Harvard, ELLERY SEDGWICKserved his editorial apprenticeship on the staff of the Youth’s Companion; he piloted a leaky Leslie’s Monthly through a rough sea; worked for a year with S. S. McClure, and then as an editor of D. Appleton & Co. In 1908 he returned to Boston to become the proprietor and eighth editor of the Atlantic. In the thirty years of his editorship the magazine rose from a circulation of 15.000 to 105.000. and with this gain went a widening interest and no lessening of quality. The wise reflections on editing which follow form the introduction to Mr. Sedgwick’s capacious anthology, Atlantic Harvest.
The Golden Age of Opera
English author, squire, and critic, SIR OSBERT SITWELLis now absorbed in writing one of the great autobiographies of our time. In Left Hand, Right Hand! he tells of his family heritage, and of Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, which has held the Sitwell character and vivacity since the seventeenth century. In The Scarlet Tree he writes of his long feud with his father and the painful Victorian education to which he and his sister Edith were subjected. Now, from the third volume, Great Morning! we have drawn this enchanting account of London, the Opera, and the Ballet as Sir Osbert saw them in the golden age just before World War I.
All Saints’ Day
Two poems for November
Burning Tree
Two poems for November
Art Workers and the State
Britain’s most distinguished dramatist, whose plays, whose letters, and whose postcards have delighted people the world over, GEORGE BERNARD SHAW is just a little wiser and older than the Atlantic. He was born in Dublin in July, 1856, and these are the dates which stand out in his record: 1876, when he captured London for life; 1884, when he became the leading spirit of the Fabian Society; 1898, when he was married; and 1925, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This Month
Elehog
JOHN MOORE is the author of several novels. His latest book. The Fair Field, a charming account of an English village, was published in 1946. He was a Lieutenant Commander in the British Fleet Air Arm during the war.
Enjoying Taxes
HERBERT COGGINS has been an ornithologist, grape picker, publisher, cement contractor, and stationer. He is now engaged in an automotive-parts and machine business in San Francisco.
Odds and Ends
Wine Magic
An international lawyer long resident in Paris, HENRY F. HOLLIS is a former United States Senator from New Hampshire. He is widely regarded as the outstanding authority on the wines of Burgundy.
Brave New Housing
This is taken in part from Dahl’s Brave New World, a book of drawings by Francis W. Dahl with text by Charles W. Morton, published October 22 (Atlantic-Little, Brown).
Cold in the Heart
The Ten Best Novels: Madame Bovary
When W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM,England’s foremost novelist, was asked to name the ten best novels in world literature, he thought at once of Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi, and Dostoevski; then the choice became difficult. For his list he chose three novels from France, two from Russia, one from America, and four from England, and thereupon resolved to write an essay in appraisal of each. Mr. Maugham spent much of his boyhood in France; he served as an intern in a London hospital, and since Of Human Bondage has scored repeated successes with his books and plays. It is with such experience that he makes this appraisal of the master craftsmen in fiction.
Amateur Citizen
BILL MAULDINentered the Infantryin his nineteenth year, picked up a Purple Heart in Italy, and later was assigned as a combat artist in one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war. His cartoons of Willie and Joe in Stars and Stripes were syndicated and won the Pulitzer Prize. With unsparing ridicule and indignation, he now exposes the sore points of peace. His crusade lands him in plenty of hot water as he candidly describes in his book, Back Home (William Sloane, Associates), the November choice of the Hook-of-the-Month Club. of which this is an excerpt.
The Notebooks of Henry James
Late in life Henry James destroyed many letters and papers, but several working notebooks survive. By 1881 he had begun to set down each new theme that occurred to him for his fiction, together with a projection of episodes, names of characters, and at intervals remarkable passages of self-criticism. In this summing up, James spoke more intimately of his aspirations than he permitted himself to do in his published autobiographies. The Notebooks, admirably edited by PROFESSORS F. O. MATTHI ESSEN and KENNETH B. MURDOCK of Harvard, are to be published by the Oxford University Press this autumn.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Science for Marxists
Russia, Past and Present
Gide: A Self-Portrait
Proud Destiny
Portrait of Edith Wharton
Renoir Drawings/Daumier
Let Me Do the Talking
The Gifted Child Grows Up
East Side, West Side
One Day at Teton Marsh
Country Place
The Pearl of Her Sex
Chatterton Square
Four Novels
Europe
The Far East
The Love Letters of Mark Twain
DION WECTER has recently been appointed Literary Executor of the Mark Twain estate. In August of this year he made the trip by riverboat down the Mississippi with Mark’s pilot book to help him pick out the old landmarks. Now Mr. Wecter has returned to the Huntington Library, where as Chairman of the Research Group he will edit the unpublished letters of Mark Twain, of which the most endearing are these to his fiancée, Olivia Langdon.
"Banking Is an Art"
A native of Newburyport and a graduate of Harvard, JOHN MARQUAND began writing fiction in 1921. The noiel was his first love, but in time his stories, particularly those about Mr. Moto, earned him wide popularity in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1936 he turned away from short fiction to write a satirical novel of contemporary New England. The Late George Apley won the Pulitzer Prize for 1938; Apley and the four novels which followed have established Mr. Marquand as a painter of the contemporary scene, a novelist keen, mature, and always entertaining. In this and the next two issues the Atlantic presents a major theme culled from the first half of Mr. Marquand’s new novel. The reader should remember that this is a portion of the first draft and that the wording may be changed slightly in the final version.
The Future of Britain
“The Kansas farmer,” says N. R. DANIELIAN, “wishing to sell his wheat to Britain had better develop a taste for British fabrics.”Here is the inescapable choice which American taxpayers must make: either to buy British goods or to keep feeding Britain on non-returnable dollars. The high-tariff boys will do well to listen to this American economist who has been associated for a number of years with the Departments of Commerce and State, and who is today the President of the American International Service Company in Washington.
General Patton's War Letters: From Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany
When GEORGE S. PATTON, JR., graduated from West Point in 1909, he was Adjutant of his class and a leading athlete in track, horsemanship,swimming,and target shooting. He was our tank expert in 1917-1918 and despite a serious wound proved the leadership which was to make him the most feared army commander in the Second World War. These letters, written to Frederick Ayer, are the affectionate record of a commander who was eager, audacious, proud of his men, wryly humorous, and implacable towards the enemy.
Serenade
Pressure Groups and Foreign Policy
SUMNER WELLESserved with distinction in our Department of State for twenty-eight years. On his graduation from Harvard he became Secretary of our embassy at Tokyo and then at Buenos Aires. There he began to specialize in the work which was to make him a leader in our Good Neighbor Policy. He was Assistant Chief of Latin American Affairs, Commissioner to the Dominican Republic mediator in the Honduras revolution in 1924, our Ambassador to Cuba at a time of trouble, and our leading delegate to many inter-American conferences. He resigned as Under Secretary of State in 1943.
