Book Excerpts

An Unfinished Woman

Lillian Hellman, who grew up in New Orleans and New York, made her reputation as one of America’s great playwrights before she was thirty. THE CHILDREN’S HOUR took New York by storm when it opened in 1934, ran for 691 performances on Broadway, and played in every major city in the United States. Her second triumph, THE LITTLE FOXES, which starred Tallulah Bankhead on the stage and Bette Davis in the film version, portrayed the selfishness and hypocrisy of a turn-of-thecentury Southern family and established Miss Hellman as a major American dramatist. The author of twelve plays in all and many film scripts, Miss Hellman has now written a book of extraordinary fascination and power. It is the memoir of the private, not the theater’s, Lillian Hellman, and in advance of its publication by Little, Brown and Company in June, we are proud to present a substantial excerpt. Originally planning to publish in two successive issues of the ATLANTIC, we decided that these pages from, AN UNFINISHED WOMAN deserved to be read at one sitting. We believe our readers will agree.

Ernest Hemingway: Living, Loving, Dying: Part Ii

The 1950s were years of triumph and decline for Hemingway, His next-to-last book, ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES, was a critical failure. Hardly had the literary obituaries dried when THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA reignited his fame and moved the Nobel Prize judges to award him “that Swedish thing.”After a plane crash in Africa, a good part of the world thought him dead, only to learn a few hours later that he was busted in several places but very much alive. But the body was failing and the corners in the back of Hemingway’s mind were darkening in the period covered in this final of two ATLANTIC excerpts from ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORYby Carlos Baker, to be published in April by Scribner’s.

Notes From the Journal of a Gentle Revolutionary

James Kunen is a twenty-year-old Columbia University junior, a participant in the insurrection there last spring and an admitted sympathizer with the radical aims of his generation. These passages from his journal show him to be more humanist than revolutionary, more democrat than anarchist, a hint to despairing elders that our world may be in better hands than they think. This excerpt is taken from his book, THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT, due from Random House in March.

No More Vietnams? The War and the Future of American Foreign Policy

The Man Who Loved Children

In 1940 Christina Stead finished her American novel, THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN. It was a good book and should have been a critical and financial success. However, readers ignored it. For many years it has been out of print, but it has just been republished by Holt, and from RANDALL JARRELL’S introduction to the new edition we have chosen the following excerpt. Mr. Jarrell, a leading literary critic and poet, is professor of English at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina.

When I Was Young and Uneasy

From her autobiography, TAKEN CARE OF, which DAME EDITH SITWELLfinished shortly before her death,we have drawn these passages,which disclose some of the angularities of her girlhood and the solace which she early found in poetry. Her volume of reminiscences will be published by Atheneum in April.

The Spread of Nuclear Weapons

Professor of sociology at the Sorbonne, RAYMOND ARON, who was born in Paris in 1905, is an author and crit the whose influence in France is comparable with that of Wolter Lippmann in America, The paper which follows has been druwn from the concluding chapter of his new book, THE GREAT DEBATE: THEORIES OF NUCLEAR STRATEGY, which is to be published this month by Doubleday.

A Writer in Search of Himself

An Irish writer, SEAN O’FAOLAIN, unlike his predecessors who trooped off to London, has defied censorship and done his work at home. He is the author of more than a score of books, and his versatility will be appreciated by those who turn to his novels, A NEST OF SIMPLE FOLK, COME BACK TO ERIN, AN AUTUMN IN ITALY, and his finest collection of short stories, I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER. This is the second installment drawn from his reminiscences, VIVE MOI!, just published by Atlantic—Little, Brown.