Editor at War
Wright, Marion A.
Editor at War The Magnolia Jungle, by P. D. East. Simon and Schuster. 243 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Marion A. Wright Books on the South's racial problem roll steadily from the press. Many of them...
...He worked for a brute of a man in a country store for fifty cents a week...
...1.50 each volume): Jackson Pollock, by Frank O'Hara, Stuart Davis, by E. C. Goossen, and Winslow Homer, by Lloyd Goodrich...
...He may not change that society...
...But at least he is not under ground...
...books upon him—these and others to some extent counter-balance the book's prevailing somber mood...
...1.50...
...But, thank God, that society has not bent him to its will...
...All these types of books are needed...
...The Human Figure, by John H. Vanderpoel (Dover...
...Especially noteworthy are the following titles in the Great American Artists Series (George Braziller, Inc...
...No one since Voltaire has more effectively used ridicule and satire to expose hypocrisy in church and state...
...He edited the paperback, "Ambrose Bierce's America...
...Tar paper shacks in a succession of saw mill camps and cross road villages housed the family during all of his boyhood...
...The Magnolia Jungle restores confidence in the limitless potentialities of human nature...
...Few more honest books have been written...
...1.25...
...a country doctor whose therapy of sympathy preserved the author's sanity, and a woman school teacher who forced THE REVIEWERS RUSSEL B. NYE, professor of English at Michigan State University, is a Pulitzer-prize winning historian...
...The Petal Paper, which he founded and miraculously keeps going, is the vehicle...
...Dabbs' The Southern Heritage and Golden's Only in America derive much of their power from this autobiographical quality...
...To that distinguished company must now be added P. D. East's The Magnolia Jungle...
...P. D. East approaches it as a brilliant satirist from the Mississippi pine lands of which he writes...
...The story of one man—his reactions, his pain, his adjustment, his growth under the stresses and conflicts of the times—reaches the lower cerebral centers...
...75 cents...
...Many of them are statistical, scholarly, informative, and profound...
...Without for one moment disparaging the great value of these books, they lack the emotional impact of the personal narrative...
...Dictionary of European Art, by Emerich Schaffran (Wisdom Library...
...Weaker men succumb to their environment, are caught up by it and become part of it...
...Early battles were with fists...
...Always he was witness to the cheating and violence practiced upon the Negro...
...It causes hackles to rise and spines to tingle...
...Even his dubious legitimacy is brought into the open...
...If there are poverty and hate and ignorance and depravity in the book, they have been seen, felt, tasted, and breathed from infancy by the author...
...Painting and Reality, by Etienne Gilson (Meridian...
...The amazing thing is not only that The Petal Paper keeps going but that East keeps alive...
...Dabbs approached the racial problem as an historian and philosopher with a plantation owner's background...
...His newest book, "The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776-1830," will be published this month...
...East, a former Methodist and Kiwanian, is completely ostracised...
...Children's Art, by Miriam Lind-strom (University of California Press...
...Golden approached it as a gentle humorist from New York's East Side...
...In The Magnolia Jungle there is no detachment from subject matter...
...2.45...
...P.D.'s foster father, quiet, patient, understanding...
...The impression should not be gotten that The Magnolia Jungle is all blood and brimstone...
...It pictures a man at war with the society in which he lives...
...1.55...
...The wild and lawless escapades of his youth are recorded...
...The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form, by Kenneth Clark (Anchor...
...Paperback Plums by William McCann Books about art and artists constitute a sizable portion of an avalanche of recently published paperbacks...
...50 Great Artists, A Short History of Western Painting from Giotto to...
...Against the solid facts of such books impressions and preconceptions may be tested...
...Fighting segregation in every issue, the paper has not a single subscriber in the town of Petal, and its local advertising is nil...
...It is pure autobiography with hardly a statistic in the entire volume...
...1.65...
...But circulation and advertising from abroad keep it afloat...
...In a state which has three hundred chapters of the White Citizens Council, in which Emmet Till was done to death, and violence is the substitute for due process of law, he survives...
...MARION A. WRIGHT is a Southern lawyer and a former president of the Southern Regional Council...
...They furnish the necessary factual basis upon which editors, students, and commentators may rear the structure of their own thinking...
...1.45...
...Nothing is glossed over...
...W. B. McCANN reviews paperbacks regularly The Progressive...
...William Faulkner, Hodding Carter, and P. D. East, all from Senator Eastland's Mississippi, prove the invincibility of the human spirit...
...When his foster mother sought to stop him from playing and fishing with Negro friends, he rebelled...
...Here are some other interesting and valuable works: The History of Western Art, by Erwin O. Christensen (Mentor...
...East fought back...
...Later and until the present, tongue and pen have been his weapons...
...Picasso, by Gertrude Stein (Beacon...
...For two years he wore the same pair of tennis shoes to school and church...
...Gentle characters, well delineated, give balance to the book...
Vol. 24 • October 1960 • No. 10
