The Contributors' Column

FOR eight years it has been the responsibility of Raoul de Roussy de Sales (p. 151) to collect the facts and to analyze the state of affairs in the United States for the benefit of his fellow Frenchmen. The American correspondent of Paris-Soir and Paris-Midi, he has been made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur for his work in America. In 1936 he received an American honor, the Strassburger Award ‘for writings considered to have served the interests of Franco-American friendship.’ His effort to gauge our temper before and after the declaration of war will be dismissed by some as propaganda and respected by others for its accuracy.

An American composer, George Antheil (p. 160) makes eloquent for us that universal language which is now being written in Hollywood as an accompaniment to our best films. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1900, George Antheil made a triumphant tour of Europe as a concert pianist in 1922. Thereafter he settled in Paris to study composition, He has written music so ‘modern’ that it caused a riot in the Champs-Élysees Theatre. He has written operas and ballets, and in 1935 Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur asked him to write the musical scores for their motion-picture productions. Cecil De iMille engaged him to do the musical score of The Plainsman in 1936, and he has been in Hollywood ever since.

Born in Italy in 1898, Max Ascoli (p. 168) received his LL. D. in 1920. He began his career as writer and teacher in the years when Fascism was coming to power — a coincidence which proved to be something of a problem. Up to 1926 he wrote articles and books on the political problems of the day and on jurisprudence. Thereafter he was obliged to confine himself wholly to his teaching. In 1931 the Rockefeller Foundation brought him to the United States as a research fellow in the Social Sciences. ‘While I was over here,’ he writes, ‘conditions in the Italian universities grew worse and made me decide not to go back. I duly notified my decision to the Italian authorities by writing an article, “Fascism in the Making,” that was published in the Atlantic for November 1933. A few months later (June 1934) another article of mine, “Notes on Roosevelt’s America,” appeared in your magazine. As you see, I owe to the Atlantic my American debut.’

Greensboro, North Carolina, should be proud ol Wilbur Daniel Steele (p. 175), whose short stories place him in the front rank of modern American writers. In 1921 he received a special O. Henry Award for maintaining the highest level of merit for three years among American short-story writers. Subsequent citations from the same committee were conferred upon him in 1925, 1926, and 1931.

With remarkable candor, Sir John Lavery (p. 186) has drawn his self-portrait of a man who rose from the slums of Belfast and Glasgow to become the most successful of modern English society painters. He was created a Knight of the British Empire in 1918 and has been president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters since 1932. An account of his Dickensian boyhood appeared in the January Atlantic.

Before joining the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation, Donald S. Howard (p. 193) had served as Director of the WPA Area Statistical Office, Denver, Colorado, and before that as Director of the Colorado Social Welfare Survey in 1934.

Born in Kiev, Russia, Marya ZatuRENSKA (p. 203) is the wife of Horace Gregory, the author of two volumes of poetry (Threshold and Hearth and Cold Morning Sky), and the mother of two children. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938.

Mrs. James Holly Hanfonl (p. 204) of Pasadena, California, is now preparing for her publishers a volume on parenthood and home psychology which will be published in the fall of this year.

Headmaster of Phillips Academy at Andover and a New England biographer whose volumes on Caleb Cushing and Daniel Webster are definitive, Claude M. Fuess (p. 209) has been working for over seven years on his fulllength and intimate study of Calvin Coolidge, from which the Atlantic is privileged to print several illuminating chapters.

In her Diary of Captivity, a Polish Nurse (p. 217) has expressed the unconquerable spirit of patriotism as it survives even in the face of overwhelming aggression. The cry which echoes through her pages is that of any small nation — Czechoslovakia, Finland, or Poland. Her Diary will be concluded in the March issue.

Washington correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,Raymond P. Brandt (p. 232), one-time Rhodes Scholar, gives us a fair-minded survey of the work performed by the Dies Committee.

Margaret Buell Wilder (p. 238), who makes her first appearance in the Atlantic, drew this thumbnail sketch of her literary beginning: ‘Born in 1904 in the middle of Ohio, I was sent East to boarding school, played hockey for three years on the same team with Kay Francis, wore middy-blouses, and was eased into Smith at the end of the Scott Fitzgerald era. Last two years there edited the Smith College Monthly on a basis of what the undergraduate will pay to read rather than on a basis of literary merit, working like a beaver to keep all the good people like Anne Morrow out of print. While graduating, fell in love with the then-editor of the Amherst Writing, who had come over to Northampton to improve his circulation. Had two children and moved ten times before our second wedding anniversary. “Abby, Her Farm" is the second piece I’ve tried, and is about my younger daughter. ‘

A good friend of the Atlantic ever since she and her husband, Vernon Kellogg, first helped to organize the Relief in Belgium in 1915, charlotte Kellogg (p. 242) will be remembered for her biography of Cardinal Mercier (1920) and for her Women of Belgium (1917).

Financial editor of the Christian Science Monitor, H. B. Elliston (p. 243) landed in Finland three days before the Russian invasion and was literally the first American correspondent on the spot. His new book describing Russia’s impact upon Scandinavia is now being rushed through the press.

It should be remembered that in the summer of 1939 Congress refused to increase the authorized loans for housing to be distributed through the Federal Government. Requests for new and perhaps increased subsidies will almost certainly be presented for Congressional action in 1940. Accordingly the Atlantic has invited Arthur C. Holden (p. 250), the New York architect, to present an analysis of the housing problem and of Congress’s attitude toward it.

L. F. Grant (p. 260) is a Canadian living in Kingston, Ontario, with an excellent sense of humor.

The friendly atmosphere of the Contributors’ Club should be conducive to the informal essay. We hope that beginning writers— young or old — will aim for the Club Prize of $250 which is awarded each month to the best essay of not more than a thousand words. The February award goes to Henri Roser (p. 262), a French Protestant pastor now imprisoned as a conscientious objector.

‘Mail-order English is plenty swishy.’ So says Wilson Follett (p. 265) as he explores the favorite reading matter of millions of Americans.

Medicine has taken Hans Zinsser (p. 267) In the far corners of the earth. Wherever there was war or infection, there he has gone to fight typhus. In Serbia in 1914-1915, in the American Army in France, in Russia after the great famine, in Mexico, South America and devastated China, he has fought with all the healing instruments of science, and in his off hours he has found time to contribute poetry to the Atlantic and to write the biography of his best friend, R. S., a doctor, humanitarian, and romanticist who bears a striking likeness to Hans Zinsser.