June 1950
In This Issue
Explore the June 1950 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Miracle at Kitty Hawk: Unpublished Letters of the Wright Brothers (Part II)
This article by Orville and Wilbur Wright's official biographer, Fred C. Kelly, includes a number of letters written by the Wrights during the years leading up to and just after their first flight.
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: South Africa
Our Best Defense
The next ten years, SUMNER H. SLIGHTER writes, will be one of our most crucial decades. He looks for the continuance of the cold war and for a defense outlay that may, by 1960, be double what it is today; and then not unhopefully he goes on to discuss the short-term and long-time trends in our working life. An economist who has steadily grown in the regard of American management and labor, Mr. Slichter stands today as one of the most fair-minded and unflurried analysts of the forces which make our wheels go round.
Peggety's Parcel of Shortcomings
In his novel A Bell for Adano and in his Report on Hiroshima. JOHN HERSEY produced two of the most remarkable documents emerging from the war. Now in his novel The Wall, the March selection of the Book-of-the-Month (Jub, a powerful, compassionate study of the Warsaw ghetto, he makes his major bid as a creative novelist. A graduate of Yale who was born in China in 1911, he served as private secretary to Sinclair Lewis and then on the staff of Time. Inc., before embarking on his independent career as a writer.
A Warning to Conquerors
The Act of Faith
If the inauguration of Margaret Clapp as president of Wellesley College, ARCHIBALD MACLEISH spoke the words that follow. The act of faith which he pleads for will be doubly significant this dune when our colleges and universities bring their thousands of seniors to Commencement. A man of action who is also a poet, Mr. MacLeish has the gift of calling out of as the elements which make an American.
In Quest of Fern Seed
Author and naturalist, DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE has had the pleasure of collaborating with his son Noel in the preparation of a new volume, A Cup of Sky, to be published by Houghton Mifflin. Mr. Peattie’s share of the booh is exemplified by this deft and observant paper; Noel, still in high school, is a self-taught student of astronomy and he contributes, among other chapters, a cycle of papers on the phases of the moon.
Can We Pay for Our Medical Schools?
As Director of Medical Affairs at Yale University since 1946, GEORCE B. DARLING knows at close hand the problems and pressures which beset our privately endowed medical schools and hospitals at the very time when there is a crying need for more and more doctors. A graduate of M.I.T. who received the degree of Doctor of Public Health at the University of Michigan in 1931, Dr. Darling served for ten rears with the W. K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, rising to be its president and comptroller. During the war he was vice-chairman of the medical division of the National Research Council.
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Paris
Poor Cousin Evelyn
JAMES YAFFE made his first appearance in the Atlantic with his short story “Mr. Feldman,” which was published in January, 1949. This is his second, and we hope for more to come. When pressed for details about himself, he wrote us: “Born in Chicago in 1927, moved to New York with my family very young, educated at Fieldston High School and Yale, spent a year in the Saw, got out of Yale with my M.A. degree, and spent a year in Paris.”
Memorial Day
"Quackery in the Public Schools": An Answer
Upwards of a hundred replies to Albert Lynd’s article in the March Atlantic were received. From them, the Editor has chosen that of DR. GILBERT E. CASE, Chairman of the Department of Education at Brown University, as the most relevant and effective rejoinder to the main questions raised by Mr. Lynd: Is the function of schools of education valid, and are these schools measuring up to the challenge of the modern world?
The Latin Quarter on Saturday Night
Author and pianist, ELLIOT PAULbegan his writing on Beacon Hill, but shifted to the Left Bank of the Seine in the 1920s. There he was the literary editor of the Paris edition first of the Chicago Tribune and then of the New York Herald, and co-editor of transition. Among his best-remembered books are The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937), The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942), Linden on the Saugus Branch (1947). Hls latest volume, Springtime in Paris, will be off the press in July.
Storytelling
CHARLES LAUGHTON recently completed a series of fifty-two one-night stands in which audiences running into thousands acclaimed his mastery of the art of reading aloud. A creative actor of immense versatility, celebrated for his roles in the theater, in the films, and on the air, he now relates for Atlantic readers how he came to cast himself in the role of storyteller.
The Art of Reading
Teacher, biographer, and the talented descendant of one of Britain’s oldest families. LORD DAVID CECIL is well known in this country for his delightful prose portrait The Young Melbourne, for his biography of the poet Cowper, The Stricken Deer, and more recently for his study of Dorothy Osborne and Thomas Gray, Two Quiet Lives. On his inauguration as Goldsmiths’ Professor of English at Oxford University, Lord David delivered this illuminating talk on the reading of great books, an essay which the Clarendon Press has published in pamphlet form.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
Potpourri
Four brief book reviews
This Month
London Restaurants
GILES PLAYFAIR, who divides his time between England and the United States, is the author of a biography of Edmund Kean and of Singapore Goes Off the Air, an account of his war experiences as production director of the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation.
Tardy Spring
Aduse Among Doughnuts
LORNA SLOCOMBE runs her own business, a typing agency, in Harvard Square, Cambridge. Her work has appeared in these pages on several previous occasions.
Ireland Revisited
Atlantic readers will remember the early motoring adventures which JOHN E. HUTTON described in two articles published in 1948. More recently, he is the author of a book entitled Trout and Salmon Fishing.
Reunion
Honor System
Born in ROANOKE, JOHN R.. ROBERSON is a degree candidate at the University of Virginia. This is his first appearance in the Atlantic.
The Haunted Fisherman
