LANNY BUDD RIDES A SIXTH TIME!
Coleman, Mcalister
Lanny Budd Rides A Sixth Time! Upton Sinclair Writes Some Shrewd History Too DRAGON HARVEST, by Upton Sinclair. Published by The Viking Press, N. Y. $3. Reviewed by McAlister Coleman AMONG a...
...This is the sixth appearance of Lanny Budd who is still a Presidential Agent, now 39 years old with wavy brown hair and a good figure due to the fact that "he had life easy and permitted himself no vices...
...Well, the Duke of Windsor shows up next and we see the Duchess "whose expression was rather grim," trying to keep the Duke on the wagon, and pretty soon we are in the Polish Corridor, and a little later we are chatting with Goering and Hitler and Hess, and even going into the spirit world to talk with the ghost of Otto Kahn...
...In this dream, no sooner did I finish the book, write my review and answer the highly emotional communications which every reviewer of Sinclair's books inevitably receives, than ex-Comrade Upton smilingly handed me a new Lanny book, this time Dragon Harvest...
...I don't know what Upton's idea of an easy life is, but having read 2,000,000 words about Lanny's hair-breadth escapes from Franco's firing-squads, Fascist machinations, and Gestapo clutches, I would say that even Upton might let a little gray creep into Lanny's brown mustache...
...But the viceless Lanny is the hardy perennial of American fiction and here he is again as the book opens, on the Riviera, chatting with members of the German underground, Winston Churchill, Lord Beaverbrook, and Maxine Elliott...
...He was going great guns on the typewriter and I was reading the latest of his "Lanny Budd Novels" for the purpose of reviewing it for The Progressive...
...the professional correspondents...
...I was in love with her at the same time as J. P. Morgan, senior, when I was about 10 years old...
...Reviewed by McAlister Coleman AMONG a couple of thousand other things in which Upton Sinclair is interested are peoples' dreams...
...The book ends with Hitler standing at the tomb of Napoleon (shades of Robert Ingersoll) in occupied Paris, and we can hardly wait for the next book to find out what happened after that...
...So I must tell him that I had a dream the other night in which I was sitting across the way from him in his California home...
...Of all things, Otto Kahn...
...I always wondered what happened to Maxine...
...When I woke up and found "Dragon Harvest" in the mail-box, I realized that the stuff that dreams are made of is often woven of reality, as Upton would put it...
...TO outline the plot of a Lanny book is to give the reader, who hasn't been around with Lanny since the first volume, World's End, appeared, once you accept Sinclair's vehicle—a young, wealthy, and ubiquitous Harry Hopkins, a smooth-talking spy for the Allied side—as fascinating reading as anything that has been written about the war, much shrewder and more truthful reporting, in fact, than a lot of stuff turned out by...
...Of all things, Maxine Elliott...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 30
