An American Diary

POLITICAL columnist of the New York Evening Post, Sam Grafton has a telling gift for phrase and aphorism. His column, “I’d Rather Be Right,” rivals Pegler’s for pungency, though it is unlikely to commend itself to the same readers. His first job was on the Philadelphia Record, and it is said that an editorial he wrote in his first three working days cost the paper a $75,000 advertising contract. The publisher remarked, a bit wanly no doubt, that any man who cost the firm $25,000 a day was a pretty valuable member of the staff, and told young Grafton to keep on swinging. Young Grafton did, and in this book he gives us a copious selection of his first four years of by-line writing.