Books: U. S. Humorist

WE ARE THE LIVING—Erskine Caldwell—Viking ($2). The late great Mark Twain never dared be quite as funny in public as he knew how to be in private; the censorship of his day was too much for him. Nowadays literary fashions are franker: almost everything can be said in print, and nearly everything is. Of all the young writers who frisk it in their new-found freedom, few kick higher heels than Erskine Caldwell, husky 30-year-old Georgian, the Methodist minister’s son whose ribald God’s Little Acre (TIME, Feb. 20) fell foul of Vice-Crusader John S. Sumner but was given a clean bill of health by the courts. Essentially a humorist, and of the earth earthly, he has not yet settled down to his role. Left wing critics have dragged tempting herrings across his track, calling him a heavyweight Red hope and trying to lure him into the ranks of the proletarian propagandists Most of the 20 stories in We Are the Living are seriously intended; some are seriously successful; but the cream of the crop are bawdy-wild humorous. Mark Twain would have roared over them—in private. Some of them:

The sound of a jackass braying spreads Dionysiac frenzy through a whole community.

A husband in whom discreet laziness outweighs valor sees with resignation that his giddy wife is about to be seduced. Unable to do anything about it, he resumes his interrupted nap.

A cautious Vermonter takes a time-honored out unusual means of making sure that his bride will not bring him a dowry of debt. A Maine farmer and his wife, who distrust foreigners anyway, are made extremely nervous by the uproarious goings-on of the Swedes across the road, (This story, “Country Full of Swedes,” fortnight ago was awarded the 1933 Yale Review prize of $1,000.)