December 1948
In This Issue
Explore the December 1948 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
Great Paintings in America
Time Will Darken It
The Birth of Israel
The Best American Short Stories of 1948/Prize Stories of 1948: The O. Henry Awards
Your First Hundred Meals
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years
The Shame of the States
This Month
u.s.a. Retasted
This is the second of two articles on food and drink in the United States by the President of the Wine and Food Society, ANDRE L. SIMON, who recently returned his home in London after some months in this country.
An Evening With the Poets
Newsreeland
JOHN ‘HOSBV is widely known for his syndieated column “Radio in Review.”His article “Radio and Who Makes It" appeared in the January, 1948, Atlantic.
Fruto, Lagartija, and Christmas
ALVA QUENEAU was born in North Dakota and is a graduate of the University of Minnesota. She married an engineer whose work took them through all of Central and South America. They are now living in Puerto Rico.
First Love
My Precarious Life in the Public Domain
What befalls the composer who copyrights an original song which happens to sound like folk music? Here is an account of it by JOHN JACOB NILES, a Kentuckian who began collecting folk music at the age of fifteen and today has more than one thousand examples. He also has brought out many songbooks and record albums.
Atomic Energy
Austria
Editor in London
On three different occasions the Editor of the Atlantic has had the opportunity of living with and observing the British people. In 1922-23, as the holder of the Fiske Fellowship he did graduate work at Trinity College, Cambridge. His next trip was in the summer of 1943, when Italy was collapsing and when the British were at last beginning to see light at the far end of the tunnel. And this autumn he went to England again to visit Atlantic authors and to take note of what has happened to a hard-pressed country as it climbs the long hill of recovery.
Modern Art and the Dignity of Man
Director of the Metropolitan Museum, FRANCIS HENRY TAYLOR has worked for twelve years on his rich and fascinating history of art-collecting, The Taste of Angels. While Director of the Worcester Art Museum, he was for two years Regional Director of the Federal Art Projects in the New England states. He is therefore not unmindful of artists" needs and aspirations. But he insists on judging their works by the same high standards which have governed the art of the past. “We cannot have” he says, “a double standard — a gold standard reserved for the Old Masters and a blocked currency or scrip for a national art of the present.”
High Policy and the Atomic Bomb
How long will the government of the United States fail to express to the American people and to the rest of the world a firm policy on the atomic bomb? And how can this policy be formed without giving the public far move information about the great decisions which must be made? President of Dewey and Almy Chemical Company and past president of the American Chemical Society, BRADLEY DEWEY directed our wartime rubber program. He served also as chairman of the Guided Missiles Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as a civilian member of their Evaluation Board for the atomic bomb tests at Bikini.
The Bells That Nobody Heard
Novelist, editor, and biographer, SEAN O’FAOLAIN is today the leading literary light in Dublin. A member of the Irish Republican Army for six years - he volunteered when he was sixteen — he returned to his books at the Trouble’s end. first to teach and then to write. Today still under fifty he has in print three volumes of short stories, three novels, three biographies, a play, a travel book, and the best short history of Ireland, The Irish.
Now I Become Myself
Fashion Is My Business
Wise buyers know that there is a brilliant store in Dallas, Texas, which has as much influence in establishing a new fashion as any rival in Manhattan. When Neimnn-Marcus he/d a fashion show last year, twenty thousand applications for tickets had to be refused for lack of space. Stanley Marcus, executive vice-president of the company, is one of those responsible for promotion techniques which have made the store not only a powerful influence on the taste of the whole Southwest but also one of the foremost arbiters of the fashion world.
Racing and Touring
An Englishman who was taught to drive by Charles Rolls of the RollsRoyce, who owned his first ear in 1898, and who built his first car, a “Simplex,” in 1901, JOHN E. MUTTON was one of the pioneer motorists in Europe. In road races Mr. Hutton hit sixty miles an hour years before Barney Oldfield, and he has driven more than “a million miles without causing bodily damage to any human being.”This is the second of his two nostalgic articles.
The Far East
A Change of Heart
The most eminent philosopher in the English-speaking world, GEORGE SANTAYANA has been working for some years on his memoirs, two volumes of which have appeared under the title Persons and Places: “The Background of My Life“ (1944) and “The Middle Span" (1945). From the final volume, now in preparation, we are privileged to draw this and a subsequent chapter. Each contains passages characteristic of Santayana at his best; each reflects his detachment from his own time, and his critical and contemplative devotion to truth.
Religion in the Independent School
The Pingry School of New Jersey is one of the oldest (1861) and largest (330) country day schools for hoys in the United States. It embraces all twelve grades and is known for its excellent record in college preparation and all-round development oj the individual boy. Perhaps the most exciting single course is that in Religion, introduced by Headmaster E. LAURENCE SPRINGER, to help boys going straight from school to war. Starting as a weekly discussion group, it is now a five-year course designed to meet youth’s need for spiritual education.
Boy Up From Hunting
The Master of the "Rockingham"
H. M. TOMLINSON was born close to the London Docks with shipping in his blood. But when he went to sea, it was not before the mast but as a writer. The Sea and the Jungle, which resulted from his maiden voyage to South America,ranks among the finest prose of our time. It was followed by Old Junk (papers of seafaring and of his work as a war correspondent in France), London River, Gallions Reach, and more recently, The Wind Is Rising, a collection of essays, written in England during the Blitz, unrivaled for their power of indignation.
No Place to Hide: What We Learned at Bikini
We present in this issue the concluding installment of DR. DAVID BRADLEY’S eveuitness account of the Bikini tests and the aftereffects of the atom bomb, Authorities have long since agreed that the violence of the atomic explosion brooks no defense. We believe that Dr. Bradley has shown, also, that there is no practical defense or countermeasure against the radioactive poison which persists for years after the mushroom cloud has disappeared. In laboratory tests, radioactivity may be removed from samples of paint, wood, and metal, but decontaminating an entire ship or the brick and c ement of a city is impossible. Dr. Bradley s book. No Place to llirle. has just been published under the Atlantic Little, Brown imprint.
The Victory
CARL MOON began writing at the age of fourteen. He read everything he could gel his hands on. and scrambled to support himself as a CLERK, bookkeeper, and purchasing agent Jar a manufacturer of broadcast equipment. After having abandoned the idea of ever writing short stories, he found during service in the Ninth Air Force that the old urge was returning. Now in his thirty-first year, he is majoring in English Literature at State University.
The Saracen's Head
English artist and writer, OSBERT LANCASTER came down from Oxford in the early thirties and studied at the Slade School. Later he became the art critic of the Observer and a cartoonist for the Daily Express, and so embarked on the writing and drawing which have earned him a delightful reputation. During the war he lived in Greece for eighteen mouths in a semi-official capaci ty, and the notes and sketches he made at that time have recently appeared in his new book. Classical Landscape with Figures. Now, in wholly different vein, he devotes himself to the adventures of William de Littlehampton, the reluctant Crusader.
The Man Who Might Have Been President: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Military expert and specialist in American foreign relations, EDWARD MEAD EARLE served as consultant at Army Air Forces Headquarters from 1942 until 1945 and was on temporary duly overseas with the Eighth and Ninth Air Forces in 1944-1945. In addition to leaching at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, he has written several books and is the editor and co-author of Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Maehiavelli to Hitler, published in 1943.
The United Nations
D. H. Lawrence's Letters to Bertrand Russell
In 1915, D. H. Lawrence, who had won recognition with his novel Sons and Lovers, met Berfrand Russell, philosopher and mathematician. Both men opposed the war and all it represented, and they intended to voice their philosophy in a series of lectures to he given together in London. II e are indebted to HARRY T. MOORE of the Babson Institute for his skillful editing and elucidation of Lawrence’s unpublished letters to Russetl, twenty-three of which will be published by the Gotham Book Mart this month.
