November 1949
In This Issue
Explore the November 1949 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
The Fruits of the Earth
Geniuses, Goddesses and People
The Greenroom
The Witness
General Fuller Reviews the War
This Month
How Football Died
SAMUEL YELLEN is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. His verse has appeared in the Atlantic and other magazines.
Christmas Cookies
VIRGINIA PASLEY is a former Chicagoan and news reporter who now lives in New York. This article was taken from The Christmas Cookie Book by Mrs. Pasley, which has just been published by Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown.
Wines of California
A San Francisco doctor by vocation, SALVATORE P. LUCIA is a well-known amateur of fine wines. He served on the Judges Committee, Red Table Wines, California State Fair, for the past three years and is a member of the Board of Governors, San Francisco Branch of the Wine and Food Society.
Pre-Game Lunch
ALEXANDER W. MOFFAT is a yachtsman who served as a naval officer in both World Wars. His “Cruising Cook” appeared in the September Atlantic.
Wave's End
Italy
Igor Stravinsky
NICOLAS NABOKOV, the composer, was horn in Russia in 1903 of a family long distinguished for its talent and liberalism. His musical education was interrupted by the Revolution. From Petrograd he went to the conservatories in Germany, and always he dreamed of Paris, where Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Balanchine, and Prokofiev had challenged and captured attention. Nabokov joined the group in Diaghilev’s workshop; his first ballet, Ode. was produced in Paris in 1928. Out of his experience has grown a book in which this Portrait of Stravinsky will be a chapter. Other chapters on Diaghilev, Balanchine, and Prokofiev will follow in successive issues.
Japanese Prisoners Home From Russia
Japan with her (indent heritage so different from ours is non poised on the threshold of democracy. Will she turn our way or Russia’s? NORA WALN, author of The House of Exile and Beaching for the Stars, has been living m Japan for the past two years. II ith her disarming Quaker spirit, she has penetrated farther than most Americans in her understanding of the uncertainty and the aspiration of the Japanese people. Her findings will come to us in the form of a regular monthly article; next month she will tell of “The Grass Roots Revolution in Japan ami of how the wealthy Japanese family has responded to the reform.
The Magnolias
A Southerner whom we regard as a discovery, GUDGER BART LEIPERwas born in Asheville,North Carolina,in March,1921, did his growing up at Signal Mountain. Tennessee,took his B.A. at the University of Chattanooga, and worked on his M.A. at the University of Minnesota, where he was a member of Robert Penn Warren’s seminar in Writing.In 1948 he received a Rosenwald Fellowship and went to Paris,where he began his first novel.
How Big in 1980?
SUMNER H. SLICHTER, the Harvard economist, is not given to wide-eyed predictions, and when he says that by 1980 — only thirty years away — income of 416 billion on a work week of only thirty hours and with a labor force of 72 million people, the hardheaded will want to know how. Well, here is his forecast in detail. Born in Madison. he took his A.B. degree at the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1918, and is today Lamont University Professor at Harvard and chairman of the Research Advisory Board of the Committee for Economic Development.
Washington
The Captain's Bath
CAPTAIN SIR DAVID WILLIAM BONE, C.B.E., LL.D., is one of the most distinguished shipmasters in the British Merchant Navy; he is also an author whose experiences in the war of 1914-1918 are described in Merchantmen-at-Arms and whose personal story of the greater conflict, 1939—1945, is about to be published. Frequently acting as Commodore of Convoy, and for four anxious years in command of an assault landing ship in North African waters, at Sicily and Anzio, the South of France, and finally on the beaches of Malaya, he has much of active incident to recall. He is now retired and finds his recollection of old sea days remembered in tranquillity.
Of an Ancient Spaniel in Her Fifteenth Year
Southern Towns and Northern Industry
Louisiana-born and today one of the most invigorating and independent of Southern editors, HOODING CARTER received the Southern Literary Award in 1945 and the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1946. Educated in the public schools of Hammond. Louisiana, and in the North at Bowdoin College, at the Columbia School of journalism, and as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1939, Mr. Carter served as a cub reporter on the New Orleans Item-Tribune, then as Manager of the AP Bureau in Jackson, Mississippi. Since 1939 he has been editor and publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi.
Aspiring Ape
The Exceptional Man
The most eminent living English philosopher, BERTRAND RUSSELL,was asked to deliver the first Reith Lectures, an endowed series of broadcasts, over the BBC. He chose for his theme the conflict between individual initiative. which is necessary for progress, and social cohesion. which is necessary for survival. From the series, we have selected the third talk as of special interest to Atlantic readers. The collected lectures have just been published by Simon and Schuster under the title Authority and the Individual.
The Editor Speaks
The Leopard Hunt
Before the war MONICA MARTIN lived for sixteen years in India in the forest area of the Bettiah Raj Estate in North Behar, where her husband was Divisional Forest Officer. From her autobiography. Out in the Mid-Day Sun, an Atlantic-Little Brown book appearing November 14, we have selected this adventure which occurred in her early thirties. Mrs. Martin is a good shot; and when her husband was preoccupied, with or without his permission she went on her own.
Not for Brody
This is the third story the Atlantic has published by W. B. READY.In writing to us about his work, he said: “As for myself, I am thirty-four, a Cardiff Irishman who married a Canadian girl overseas. We have two sons, Patrick and Vincent. I am a member of the History Department at the University of Minnesota and I teach a course in creative writing at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul. Most of my energy goes into writing and thinking about Thomas D’Arcy McGhee, a Canadian founding father.”
Civil, Rights for the Negro
RALPH MCGILL, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, is known throughout the South for his fighting heart, for the integrity of his editorial page, and for his two-fisted editorial approach to any bothersome problem below Mason and Dixon’s line. A guard at Vanderbilt, and a good one, he tackles for us one of the most divisive subjects in American democracy: civil rights for whites and for Negroes. The right to vote, he says, is the basic civil right.
October Mornings
A Bostonian who has often matched his strength with the sea, WYMAN RICHARDSON, as his father before him, has found his heart’s desire in the remote and rustic Farm House at Eastham which gives him and his family quid; access to the ocean, the Nauset Marsh,and one of the most beautiful beaches in all Cape Cod. Here Dr. Richardson retreats to fish and to observe the birds. This is the fifth of his series of nature essays.
Young John Adams: A State of Rebellion
In Yankee from Olympus, CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN showed us the decisiveness of that Great Dissenter, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. For the past three years she has been working on a comparable portrait of Young John Adams, who was brought up to believe in British rights and British freedom and who in his thirties, from 1765 to 1775, worked to effect a new freedom on this side of the Atlantic. Those ten years were the most important, the most dynamic, of John Adams’s life. From the final section of Miss Bowen’s book, the Atlantic has selected five installments. The first showed us the Massachusetts delegation to the Continental Congress on the road to Philadelphia in August, 1774; the second, “John Yankee” in Carpenters’ Hall.
The Spirit of Charles Williams
One of the top-ranking journalists of New York, GEOFFREY PARSONShas been the chief editorial writer of the New York Herald Tribune since 1924. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1942. The author of two books and an omnivorous reader, he here attempts that most difficult of tasks: the recommending to an American audience of an English author whom we have long neglected.
Hong Kong
The Novel of Contemporary History
A foreign correspondent who saw action in the Pacific and European theaters; the author of three war books, Men on Bataan, Into the Valley, and A Bell for Adano; JOHN HERSEY is as well known for his fiction as he is for his documented and appalling report on Hiroshima. In this essay, which will subsequently appear in The Writer’s Book, an anthology edited by Helen Hull and sponsored by the Authors Guild, he states the aim of a novelist who, like himself, wishes to write a story of contemporary history.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
The River Line
This I Saw: Life and Times of Goya
