September 1951
In This Issue
Explore the September 1951 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
London
James Norman Hall 1887-1951
ELLERY SEDGWICK,who was Editor of the Atlantic from 1908 to 1938, first began to receive the manuscripts of James Norman Hall in 1912. Hall, a young graduate from Grinnell College, had come to Boston to work as an investigator for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and in the evening hours devoted himself to the writing of poems and of essays not many of which found their mark. Hall was cycling in England in the summer of 1914, and when the war broke out, he volunteered as a ”Canadian“ in Kitchener’s Mob: later he was transferred and trained as a pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille. It was in these war years that his first major contributions began to appear in the Atlantic. From that time on, no contributor was more beloved.
A Matter of Conviction
In Chicago last June the U.S. Chamber of Commerce held a conference in which a number of executives were invited to ”explain" their particular business. CLARENCE B. RANDALL,who has been President of Inland Steel Company since 1949, spoke without notes but with such sharp effect that his words found immediate reverberations in the Chicago press. Mr. Randall served as Paul Hoffman’s adviser on steel in the early days of the ECA. He has seen at first hand the cartels of Europe and the effects of socialism in Britain, and he believes the time has come for capitalism to go on the offensive. Here is what he said in Chicago.
Broken Idol
I Bought a Dress in Paris
American travelers who have recently been shopping in Paris will read with sympathy this forthright. documented article by SALLY ISELIY. Mrs. Iselin could have been a Proper Bostonian. Instead she married and went to New York, where she has scored a swift success as columnist, feature writer, and editor. Today she is working for the Columbia Broadcasting System and keeping her pen busy in off hours.
In the White Giant's Thigh
The Road of the Loving Heart: Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa
Authors who have enjoyed enormous popularity in their day are very likely to be neglected for some time after their death. Then comes reassessment, which in the exceptional case is accompanied by a revival of interest. This has happened recently in the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and if J. C. FURNAS is right, an even greater retribution is due to Robert Loius Stevenson. For ten years Mr. Furnas, who was graduated from Harvard in 1927, has been following Stevenson’s trail in Oceania, in the United States, and in Scotland, and from his glowing appreciative biography. Voyage to Windward, which will be published in October by William Sloane Associates, the Atlantic has been privileged to draw two sections.
France
Bullying the Civil Service
The government employee is already set apart from other citizens by many drastic procedures concerning his loyalty, occupational expenses, and habit of life. Now comes a bill which would put his ”ethics” under the permanent scrutiny of a commission with subpoena power and a staff of investigators. Some of the unsuspected aspects of this kind of regulation are pointed out by THURMAN ARNOLD, Professor of Law at Yale from 1931 to 1938; Assistant Attorney General of the United States from 1938 to 1943; and former Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
A Girl Called Peter
Novelist and master of the short story, H. E. BATES was attached to the Royal Air Force during the Second World War; and the short stories which he wrote at that time under the signature of Flying Officer X had an enormous reading in England. His new collection, Colonel Julian and Other Stories, from which we have drawn the poignant narrative which follows, will appear as an Atlantic-Little, Brown book in early October.
It's the Rain
The Summer Steelhead
A Californian, born and bred, of a family long interested in oil. CLARK C. VAN FLEET began fishing when he was a small boy. Over the past four decades, he has devoted most of his recreation hours to fishing for — and studying — the steelhead trout, the greatest game fish of the West Coast. From his letters and diaries he has drawn an exciting, edifying, humbling account of his favorite streams and his great warrior. This is the second of three articles, the first of which appeared in the Atlantic for August.
After an a-Bomb Falls
Dean of the Graduate School of Massachusetts Institute of Technology , JOHN W . M. BUNKER has been a rallying force for Civil Defense in Cambridge and is acting in an advisory capacity throughout the Commonwealth. “My thesis is,”he says, “teach the individual, leach lots of individuals, make up teams in communities, each after a similar pattern so that each can go to work elsewhere. because the team under the bomb will not function as a team but as individuals needing aid. The teams that go to work are from the fringes. Every team must be prepared to work elsewhere. The trained can perhaps save themselves and their families and others.”
The Fifth Day
A native New Yorker in his twenty-fifth year, PETER MATTHIESSEN was educated at Yale and the Sorbonne, and is now living and working in France. Last year he taught creative writing at Yale but gave up teaching in order to devote full time to his first novel. “Sadie” an Atlantic “First” appeared in the January issue. This is Mr. Matthiessen’s second short story.
The American Temperament
A native of Greenville, Mississippi, and a graduate of Yale, DAVID L. COHN has come to judge this country by cosmopolitan standards. In the short paper which follows, he raises a vital question: Have we the right temperament to cope with the responsibilities we have assumed? Mr. Cohn's books include Picking America’s Pockets,a volume about our tariff policy; Where I Was Horn and Raised, a study of race relations; a war diary covering some 40,000 miles; and two volumes of a lighter nature, The Good Old Days and Love in America.
Fog
On the magnificent stretch of Nauset Beach and on the ponds and marshes that lie inland, DR. WYMAN RICHARDSON for going on fifty summers has lived a life of action and observation, watching the bird life as has paddled or fished for stripers, and ever conscious of the sea changes which, he tells us, roll in the fog one day in three. This is the seventh in his series of Cape Cod essays which have appeared in the ATLANTIC.
The Vanderbilt Cup
Road-racing gave the American automobile industry an impetus it was never to lose, and few sports events in our history have drawn crowds comparable to the 500,000 who turned out for the Vanderbilt Cup competitions forty-odd years ago. KEN PURDY is editor of True, an authority on motor racing here and abroad, and he recently gave up his 1912 brassbound Mercer Raceabout in favor of a vintage Grand Prix Bugatti.
What Happened to the Short Story
Each year the hast American short stories are hand-picked by a distinguished jury. The O. Henry Memorial Awards are conferred on the best. and the finalists, a group of some twenty, are then published in a Memorial Volume. HERSCHEL BRICKELL, author, editor, and critic, has been a judge of the O. Henry Awards for the past eleven years, He has had an exceptional opportunity to reflect on the changes which have occurred in the short story — changes which he describes in the essay which follows.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Books: The Editors Like
The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington
Reader's Choice
Moonfleet
The Best American Short Stories of 1951
The Anatomy of Happiness
Talks With Nehru: A Discussion Between Jawaharlal Nehru and Norman Cousins
Accent on Living
Tourist in Argentina
A Hollywood Child Star's Garden of Verses. Iii (Apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson)
Quiet-I'm on a Diet
All Up in a Heaval
Provence Without Garlic
Bridge Fishermen
