Under a Thatched Roof
$2.75
By HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
SEVERAL of the papers collected here will be recognized with pleasure by Atlantic readers. Mr. Hall’s essays are the product of unhurried observation and reflection at intervals while he was chiefly engaged in writing the famous Bounty trilogy and other South Seas fiction.
Besides essays, strictly speaking, there are a series of burlesque stories and a dialogue in nonsense verse reminiscent of Lewis Carroll. But a single stout thread holds together all these varied bits of experience and fancy: Mr. Hall’s insistence on the value of leisure and urbanity, those sadly neglected fundamentals of any ripe civilization. In his defense of the essay and all the mellowness of mind that essay writing connotes, in his nostalgic preference for the placid small-town world of his Iowa boyhood, and in his determined isolation from the pressures of competitive living, Mr. Hall is voicing a quiet but persuasive dissent from the desperate tensions of our time.
G. F. W.