Cottonmouth

$2.75

By Julian Lee Rayford

SCRIBNERS

HERE is something men will love: a novel confined entirely to a boy’s world and told in a boy’s language. The Brewster kids appear to have left girls completely out of account. Known as those dam’ Brewster kids, they often act like hoodlums, but are saved from being just tough by the family code of their mother and their Creole nurse-housemaid-cook Nanny. As the life of Paul, the youngest, is told year by year, the city of Mobile — its look and its soul — becomes more and more seen and felt. For Paul the city is a passion, but only because it represents life and the world in general. His creed is that of the artist for whom experience is an end in itself: ‘The harder life came, the better he liked it, he’d go out of his way to meet it. . . . If life is worth living, then every ounce of it is worth living, worth looking at, and there is nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of as long as it was met honestly and intensely.’ R.M.G.

W. H. C. WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN
C. P. C. CHARLES P. CURTIS, JR.
W. P. WILSON FOLLETT
R. M. G. ROBERT M. GAY
T. S. THEODORE SPENCER