Good Books That Die on the Vine
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
Good Books That Die on the Vine By DeLancey Ferguson Former Chairman, Department of English, Brooklyn College Publication by a university press is one of the more dignified ways of attaining...
...The Matterhorn could be no more than a ten-pin to it...
...The Stephen Crane book2 is something' quite different: a new chapter in the life of one of America's most original and most baffling geniuses...
...If they live within the circulation area of the best New York papers, such readers have a chance of hearing about such books...
...2 Stephen Crane's love Letters to Nellie Crouse...
...No one who reads this urbane study of Dickens's literary reputation, from Pickwick until now, will ever again be too deeply impressed by the absolutist tone of any literary criticism...
...I believe, the intelligence of the average saw-log and he can no doubt enjoy anything...
...Quite a number of people who like Dickens would enjoy George H. Ford's survey of his critical reputation,1 if they knew the book existed...
...Such glimpses of the inner life of a unique spirit should interest almost anyone who knows The Red Badge and The Open Boat...
...In the mid-summer slack season, the university book may fare better than it would in fall or winter...
...In the year of fame that saw the appearance of both The Black Riders and The Red Badge of Courage, Crane fell in love with an Akron girl named Nellie Crouse, who was easy to look at and vivacious as well...
...The author so given to the world can realize how apt was Don Marquis's quip that publishing a book is like dropping a rose-petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo...
...Madison, Wisconsin, for instance, is a state capital and a university town...
...Thus, Richard Harding Davis "has...
...He balanced such self-appraisal with similar appraisals of others...
...The critics turn out to be as much the slaves of fashion as women are...
...Will there ever be a U.S...
...His contemporaries thought him ruthless in his portrayal of life...
...But university presses publish other things which, in subject and presentation, might interest a good many people who are not scholars in the academic sense...
...And again, "There is only one person in the world who knows less than the average reader...
...Donley said the Supreme Court follows the election returns, so the editors must keep an eye on the business office...
...Syracuse...
...Sometimes space never does open...
...Good Books That Die on the Vine By DeLancey Ferguson Former Chairman, Department of English, Brooklyn College Publication by a university press is one of the more dignified ways of attaining obscurity...
...But how much chance has the average reader of learning that the glimpses are obtainable...
...Ford's book was even reviewed by Lewis Gannett in the daily Herald Tribune...
...The two books here considered are typical of scores, though Mr...
...Princeton...
...This summer, for instance...
...they can go from literary crinolines to literary sun-suits, and back, with the same bland conviction that the latest thing is what the world has been looking for all along...
...But the larger world of intelligent general readers does not, for it has no way of learning that such books exist...
...for one reader interested in hearing about the by-ways and by-products of a biographer, a hundred, or a thousand, want to hear about the latest headliner...
...just as Mr...
...Toward highly specialized works, public silence is inevitable...
...But...
...Yet, the only book news a Madisonian gets, unless he subscribes to the Times or the Saturday Review, is Sterling North's syndicated column...
...1 Dickens and His Readers...
...When I reached twenty-one years...
...It deserves it...
...By George H. Ford...
...equivalent of the London Times Literary Supplement...
...Nationwide, the situation gets steadily worse, as the number of intelligent newspapers and magazines steadily shrinks...
...Ford's, as we have noted, has had better than average luck...
...87 pp...
...The scholar who establishes the precise date of Chaucer's Troilus expects, and gets, only the judgment of his peers in the columns of a few scholarly journals, anywhere from six months to three years after the review copies go out...
...But this asperity masked a profoundly sensitive spirit that could say...
...He is the average reviewer...
...For my own part, I am minded to die in my thirty-fifth year...
...The Times and Herald Tribune do send university-press books out for review, and as often as not the reviews get printed...
...Space being limited, only superhuman virtue--or folly--could give a university book precedence over a Literary Guild selection good for a full-page ad...
...he was equally ruthless in portraying himself...
...Unnoticed by the press at large, this book will reach the shelves of college libraries, for the little self-hybridizing academic world keeps abreast of such publications...
...This is what happens in the metropolitan area...
...Books dealing with limited phases of history or biography can give pleasure to readers already on speaking terms with the subject...
...She did not marry Crane, but before she dismissed him she had received seven of the most intimate letters he ever wrote...
...The newspaper, moreover, is a mass-circulation medium...
...he told Miss Crouse, "and first really scanned my personal egotism I was fairly dazzled by the size of it...
...by Edwin H. Cady and Lester G. Wells...
...I think that is all I care to stand.' He bad his wish, with six years to spare...
...6.00...
...The rest of the country lacks even this half- or quarter-hearted coverage...
...2.50...
...318 pp...
...So the university book's review may stand in galleys for weeks before space opens...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 39
