THE BOOK REVIEW DIGESTVol. XVI      February, 1921      No. 12
THE BOOK REVIEW DIGESTVol. XVI      February, 1921      No. 12
THE BOOK REVIEW DIGESTVol. XVI      February, 1921      No. 12
THE BOOK REVIEW DIGEST
Vol. XVI      February, 1921      No. 12
PUBLISHED MONTHLY BYTHE H. W. WILSON COMPANYNew York City      958–964 University Avenue
PUBLISHED MONTHLY BYTHE H. W. WILSON COMPANYNew York City      958–964 University Avenue
PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY
THE H. W. WILSON COMPANY
New York City      958–964 University Avenue
Entered as second class matter, November 13, 1917 at the Post Office at New York, under the act of Congress of March 3, 1879.
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Combined rate for Book Review Digest, Cumulative Book Index and Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature $60 per page per month; two of these publications $50; one of these publications $40 per page per month. Smaller space and contract rates furnished upon request.
The editorial staff for the year has consisted of Mary Katharine Reely, Pauline H. Rich, Emma Heller Schumm, Elsie Jacobi, Wilma Adams and Selma Sandler. Acknowledgments are also due to Miss Corinne Bacon who contributed the classification numbers for the first months of the year, and to Miss Eleanor Hawkins who succeeded her; to Miss Mary E. Furbeck of the New York Public Library for the list of documents for small libraries; and to the Applied Science reference department of Pratt Institute Library for the quarterly list of technical books.
In addition to the periodicals listed on the reverse side of this page the following magazines have been drawn on for occasional reviews: Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Social Hygiene, Mental Hygiene, Socialist Review, Nation [London], Theatre Arts Magazine, Drama, World Tomorrow, Chemical & Metallurgical Engineering, and a few other technical journals. The literary supplement to the New York Evening Post, now issued under the editorship of Professor Henry Seidel Canby of Yale University, is an important permanent addition to the list of periodicals. During the year the magazine which began its career as the Review, changing later to Weekly Review, has been listed under its original name.
The year just past has been notable for a number of novels of unusual quality. Among them is a group of books by and about women: Clemence Dane’s “Legend,†Catherine Carswell’s “Open the Door,†Miss de la Pasture’s “Tension,†and Mrs Holding’s “Invincible Minnie.†Three others are novels of the Middle West: Sherwood Anderson’s “Poor White,†Floyd Dell’s “Moon-calf,†and Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street.†Zona Gale’s “Miss Lulu Bett†might be named in either class.
“George Santayana has recently spoken of the barbarian realities of America. ‘The luckless American who is born a conservative, or who is drawn to poetic subtlety, pious retreats, or gay passions, nevertheless has the categorical excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform and prosperity dinned into his ears: every door is open in this direction and shut in the other; so that he either folds up his heart and withers in a corner—in remote places you sometimes find such a solitary gaunt idealist—or else he flies to Oxford or Florence or Montmartre to save his soul—or perhaps not to save it.’ That is and has been the traditional conception of aesthetic fate in barbaric America, especially in the hinterland beyond the Hudson. But the past ten years, and particularly the years since the war, have shown new possibilities to the present literary generation. The Bohemian immigrant in Nebraska, the local dentist in Wisconsin, the doctor’s wife in a small Minnesota town, the young newspaper man in Iowa, the co-educated farmer’s daughter in Ohio—all these figures can be seen with the same meditative zeal, the same creative preoccupation, as the ripened spiritual personalities of Europe.â€â€”New Republic.
We now have anthologies and year books for the short story, for the best plays, for magazine and even for newspaper verse. The annual volume of the Digest might be added to the list as the year book for book reviews. Without entering into elaborate summaries and statistics we may say that the two most reviewed books of the year are Keynes’s “Economic Consequences of the Peace†and Wells’s “Outline of History.†And without attempting to create a new category of “best†reviews we may suggest that the following will be found well worthy of reading: Richard Burton’s review of “The Ordeal of Mark Twain†by Van Wyck Brooks in the Bookman of January, 1921; W. S. Braithwaite’s review of “Smoke and Steel†by Carl Sandburg in the Boston Transcript of October 16, 1920; the reviews of Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street†by Carl Van Doren in the New York Evening Post, Nov. 20, 1920, and by Francis Hackett, in the New Republic, Dec. 1, 1920; and J. Saywyn Shapiro’s review (with footnotes) of Wells’s “Outline of History†in the Nation of Feb. 9, 1921.