Fiction: Recent Books: Feb. 28, 1938

Non-Fiction

ONE AMERICAN—Frazier Hunt— Simon & Schuster ($3). Latest addition to the crop of newspapermen’s reminiscences, containing somewhat stereotyped portraits of many of the world’s great, somewhat stereotyped editorial philosophizing about current affairs (“So America marched toward the horizon of her doom”) but revealing a warm, unaffected personality emerging from its clusters of cliches.

MARK TWAIN—Edgar Lee Masters—Scribner ($2.75). Polemical biography that goes beyond Van Wyck Brooks’s The Ordeal of Mark Twain in picturing the humorist as a clown whose genius was warped by his refusal to challenge the ruling powers; written in an exasperated style that suggests Poet Masters would not have enjoyed Mark Twain even if he had written in another fashion.

GENERAL WASHINGTON’S DILEMMA—Katharine Mayo—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). Elaborately researched, mustily told account of an involved cause celebre, now forgotten. The gist: Washington weaseled out of his mandate to execute a British officer in reprisal for the killing of an American sympathizer in Monmouth County, N. J.; by the author of Mother India.

BRANDY FOR HEROES—Jack Kofoed—Button ($3). Picturesque biography, in the beery-teared Gene Fowler tradition, of a forgotten fighting Irishman of Manhattan’s roaring ’60s, one John Morrissey, who rose from a brothel bouncer to underworld boss to heavyweight champion to Tammany State senator, founded Saratoga Springs’ famed Casino.