Best of
20th-Century

1948

A Perfect Day for Bananafish


J.D. Salinger - 1948
    D. Salinger, originally published in the January 31, 1948 issue of The New Yorker. It was anthologized in 1949's 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, as well as in Salinger's 1953 collection, Nine Stories.

Selected Poems


T.S. Eliot - 1948
    Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature-”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”-as well as many other fine selections from Eliot’s early work.

The Little World of Don Camillo


Giovannino Guareschi - 1948
    In this period the Italian Communist Party is very strong, but the Second World War and fascism are still vividly remembered. Boscaccio has a communist mayor named Peppone. He wants to realise the communist ideals, and the Roman Catholic priest Don Camillo is desperately trying to prevent this. But despite their different views these men can count on each other in the fight against social injustice and abuses.

No Longer Human


Osamu Dazai - 1948
    In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.Cover painting by Noe Nojechowiz, from the collection of John and Barbara Duncan; design by Gertrude Huston

Adán Buenosayres


Leopoldo Marechal - 1948
    Employing a range of literary styles and a variety of voices, Leopoldo Marechal parodies and celebrates Argentina's most brilliant literary and artistic generation, the martinfierristas of the 1920s, among them Jorge Luis Borges. First published in 1948 during the polarizing reign of Juan Perón, the novel was hailed by Julio Cortázar as an extraordinary event in twentieth-century Argentine literature. Set over the course of three break-neck days, Adam Buenosayres follows the protagonist through an apparent metaphysical awakening, a battle for his soul fought by angels and demons, and a descent through a place resembling a comic version of Dante's hell. Presenting both a breathtaking translation and thorough explanatory notes, Norman Cheadle captures the limitless language of Marechal's original and guides the reader along an unmatched journey through the culture of Buenos Aires. This first-ever English translation brings to light Marechal's masterwork with an introduction outlining the novel's importance in various contexts - Argentine, Latin American, and world literature - and with notes illuminating its literary, cultural, and historical references. A salient feature of the Argentine canon, Adam Buenosayres is both a path-breaking novel and a key text for understanding Argentina's cultural and political history.

A Russian Journal


John Steinbeck - 1948
    This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document. Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II. This is an intimate glimpse of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle

The Makioka Sisters


Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - 1948
    As told by Junichiro Tanizaki, the story of the Makioka sisters forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family–and an entire society–sliding into the abyss of modernity.Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances. Filled with vignettes of upper-class Japanese life and capturing both the decorum and the heartache of its protagonist, The Makioka Sisters is a classic of international literature.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev


Victor Serge - 1948
    In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to sit beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.

Autumn Term


Antonia Forest - 1948
    Twins Nicola and Lawrie arrive at their new school determined to do even better than their distinguished elder sisters, but things don't turn out quite as planned.

European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages


Ernst Robert Curtius - 1948
    Eliot), Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956), one of the foremost literary scholars of this century, examines the continuity of European literature from Homer to Goethe, with particular emphasis on the Latin Middle Ages. In an extensive new epilogue, drawing on hitherto unpublished material, Peter Godman, Professor of Medieval Latin at the University of Tubingen, analyzes the intellectual and political context and character of Curtius's ideas.

Cache Lake Country: Life in the North Woods


John J. Rowlands - 1948
    After paddling alone for several days—"it was so quiet I could hear the drops from the paddle hitting the water"—he came upon "the lake of my boyhood dreams." He never left. He named the place Cache Lake because there was stored the best that the north had to offer—timber for a cabin; fish, game, and berries to live on; and the peace and contentment he felt he could not live without.Cache Lake Country is a vivid and faithful chronicle of life in the great Northern Forest and a storehouse of valuable information on woodcraft and nature. Here is folklore and philosophy, but most of all wisdom about the woods and the inventiveness and self-reliance they demand. The author explains how to make moccasins, barrel stoves, lean-to shelters, outdoor bake ovens, sailing canoes, and hundreds of other ingenious and useful gadgets, all illustrated in the margins with 230 enchanting drawings by Henry B. Kane.

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp


Józef Czapski - 1948
    In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.Includes an 8-page color insert of Czapski’s lecture notes.

Half a Lifelong Romance


Eileen Chang - 1948
    Shen Shijun, a young engineer, has fallen in love with his colleague, the beautiful Gu Manzhen. He is determined to resist his family's efforts to match him with his wealthy cousin so that he can marry the woman he truly loves. But dark circumstances--a lustful brother-in-law, a treacherous sister, a family secret--force the two young lovers apart. As Manzhen and Shijun go on their separate paths, they lose track of one another, and their lives become filled with feints and schemes, missed connections and tragic misunderstandings. At every turn, societal expectations seem to thwart their prospects for happiness. Still, Manzhen and Shijun dare to hold out hope--however slim--that they might one day meet again. A glamorous, wrenching tale set against the glittering backdrop of an extraordinary city, Half a Lifelong Romance is a beloved classic from one of the essential writers of twentieth-century China"--

Family Roundabout


Richmal Crompton - 1948
    We are shown the matriarchs around whom their families spin; but whether they direct their children gently or forcefully, in the end they have to accept them as they are.

Spring Fever


P.G. Wodehouse - 1948
    Ellery Cobbold has sent his son Stanwood, a blundering ex-American football player, to London, to separate him from Hollywood starlet Eileen Stoker with whom he is in love. When Cobbold discovers that Stoker is also in London, making pictures, he insists that Stanwood goes to stay with a distant relation, curmudgeonly widower Lord Shortlands.Spring Fever is a novel by P.G. Wodehouse, first published on 20 May 1948, in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London and in the United States by Doubleday and Co, New York. Although not featuring any of Wodehouse's regular characters, the cast contains a typical Wodehousean selection of English aristocrats, wealthy Americans, household staff and imposters.

Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition


Aimé Césaire - 1948
    Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Cesaire poem is an intersection at which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupe has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Cesaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text--eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupe. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.

One Arm and Other Stories


Tennessee Williams - 1948
    It was this book which established Williams as a short story writer of the same stature and interest he had shown as a dramatist. Each story has qualities that make it memorable. In “One Arm” we live through his last hours and memories with a 'rough trade" ex-prizefighter who is awaiting execution for murder. "The Field of Blue Children" explores some of the strange ways of the human heart in love, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" is a luminous and nostalgic recollection of characters who figure in "The Glass Menagerie," while "Desire and the Black Masseur" is an excursion into the logic of the macabre. "The Yellow Bird," well known through the author's recorded reading of it, which tells of a minister's daughter who found a particularly violent but satisfactory way of expiating a load of inherited puritan guilt, may well become part of American mythology.

Yeats: The Man and the Masks


Richard Ellmann - 1948
    One of the most influential poets of his age, W.B. Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. His life was complex in both its outer and inner events. Yeats's mystical concerns, such as his involvement with spiritualism and construction of a transcendental world system in A Vision, coexisted and occasionally clashed with his active involvement in public affairs. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.

Still Glides the Stream


Flora Thompson - 1948
    

The Heart of the Matter


Graham Greene - 1948
    But when he’s passed over for a promotion as commissioner of police, the humiliation hits hardest for his wife, Louise. Already oppressed by the appalling climate, frustrated in a loveless marriage, and belittled by the wives of more privileged officers, Louise wants out. Feeling responsible for her unhappiness, Henry decides against his better judgment to accept a loan from a black marketeer to secure Louise’s passage. It’s just a single indiscretion, yet for Henry it precipitates a rapid fall from grace as one moral compromise after another leads him into a web of blackmail, adultery, and murder. And for a devout man like Henry, there may be nothing left but damnation.

The German Generals Talk


B.H. Liddell Hart - 1948
    Liddell Hart, noted British miltary strategist and writer. They speak as professional soldiers to a man they know and respect. For the first time, answers are revealed to many questions raised during the war. Was Hitler the genius of strategy he seemed to be at first? Why did his Generals never overthrow him? Why did Hitler allow the Dunkirk evacuation?Current interest, of course, focuses on the German Generals' opinion of the Red Army as a fighting force. What did the Russians look like from the German side? How did we look? And what are the advantages and disadvantages under which dictator-controlled armies fight?In vivid, non-technical language, Capt. Liddell Hart reports these interviews and evaluates the vital military lessons of World War II.

Elizabeth of the Garret Theatre


Gwendoline Courtney - 1948
    Alison was broken hearted that she could not fulfil her dream of keeping house for her father. Elizabeth decided that the new Mrs Verney had somehow trapped her father into marriage. Georgie’s vision was coloured by fairy tales, and even Susan was shaken out of her comfort zone. But Nan had her own weapons which included patience, humour and good cooking and the battle was more than half won before Nigel Gifford, the great Shakespearean actor, arrived on the scene to give the thrill of a lifetime to a family who loved acting above everything.

Complete Plain Words


Ernest A. Gowers - 1948
    Current usage of vocabulary and style is explained clearly and sections included, cover: jargon, cliches, spelling and punctuation; ground rules of grammar; superfluous words, using words correctly and concisely, overuse or misuse; sexist language, the influence of science and technology, American English and exemplary clarity.

The Ides of March


Thornton Wilder - 1948
    Through imaginary letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of its magnetic personalities.In this novel, the Caesar of history becomes Caesar the human being as he appeared to his family, his legions, his Rome, and his empire in the months just before his death. In Wilder’s inventive narrative, all Rome comes crowding through his pages. Romans of the slums, of the villas, of the palaces, brawling youths and noble ladies and prostitutes, and the spies and assassins stalking Caesar in his Rome.

Westward Ha!


S.J. Perelman - 1948
    Perelman's companion is cartoonist Al Hirschfield, whose drawings capture the very essence of Perelmania.

The End: Hamburg 1943


Hans Erich Nossack - 1948
    It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end.Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburg—the city where he was born and where he would later die—from across its Elbe River. He heard the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched his neighbors flee; he wondered if his home—and his manuscripts—would survive the devastation. The End is his terse, remarkable and moving memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the German perspective.In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of the most important German books on the firebombing of that country. "A small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

Miss Tippy


Janet Lambert - 1948
    Tippy, the youngest of four children in a vibrant army family, longs to be considered grown up but even at her Sweet 16 party she has a hard time getting the respect she thinks she deserves.

Selected Stories


Katherine Mansfield - 1948
    The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen all praised her stories, and her early death at the age of thirty-four cut short one of the finest short-story writers in the English language. This selection covers the full range of Mansfield's fiction, from her early satirical stories to the subtly nuanced comedy of 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' and the macabre and ominous 'A Married Man's Story'. The stories that pay what Mansfield calls 'a debt of love' to New Zealand are as sharply etched as the European stories, and she recreates her childhood world with mordant insight. Disruption is a constant theme, whether the tone is comic, tragic, nostalgic, or domestic, echoing Mansfield's disrupted life and the fractured expressions of Modernism. This new edition increases the selection from 27 to 33 stories and prints them in the order in which they first appeared, in the definitive texts established by Anthony Alpers.

Rendezvous With Destiny: History Of The 101st Airborne Division


Leonard Rapport - 1948
    Never before has such a detailed study been made of the organization, training and operations of a single division of the United States Army. Each action in which the Division took part has been minutely studied and checked against available operations reports and the memories of the men who were there.

Psychological Warfare (WWII Era Reprint)


Paul M.A. Linebarger - 1948
    Even today, it explains the basic principles of propaganda and psychological warfare (both white and black), from organization and planning to analysis and response. Examples are drawn from military history, with an emphasis on tactics by both the Allies and Axis during World War II. This is a fascinating subject, with greater relevance to everyday business and politics than may be immediately recognized.

Scratches


Michel Leiris - 1948
    In the end, he so mercilessly scrutinizes what was familiar that its familiarity drops away and it blossoms into something exotic. As Leiris recollects his childhood, his father's recording machine becomes a miraculous object and the letters of the alphabet - from A (or the double ladder of a house painter) to I (a soldier standing at attention) to X (the cross one makes on something whose secret one will never penetrate) - come magically to life. Also here are evocations of Paris under the occupation, his journey to Africa, and meditations on his fear of death, which he tried to exorcise through his autobiographical writings.

The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943


Joseph Goebbels - 1948
    

The Locusts Have No King


Dawn Powell - 1948
    Powell sets a see-saw in motion when Olliver is swept up by the tasteless publishing tycoon, Tyson Bricker, and his new book makes its way onto to the bestseller lists just as Lyle's Broadway career is coming apart.

By Secret Railway: A Story of the Underground Railroad


Enid LaMonte Meadowcroft - 1948
    He didn't get the job, but he met Jim. That chance encounter with a young black boy led David into strange and thrilling adventures that took him far from home, involved him in the mysteries of the Underground Railroad, and ended with his meeting President-elect Abraham Lincoln, whom David had long wanted to meet for a particular reason.How David rescued Jim, who had been kidnapped and taken to Missouri, and how the two boys escaped to the free state of Illinois with the help of courageous "conductors" on the Underground, makes a fascinating yarn which holds the interest of young readers to the last line. But By Secret Railway is more than an absorbing adventure story. It is the account of a loyal friendship between two boys in a situation with important implications for young Americans of today. It is also a vivid picture of uneasy times during which ideals of individual freedom were on trial in America, as they are now throughout the world.

Joseph Goebbels: The Devil's Advocate


Curt Riess - 1948
    the future does not belong to the masses but ... to him who drives them; to him who organizes them. The new century belongs to the King of the Masses. The mass movements of our time will end in a dictatorship." This was the credo of Joseph Goebbels, the educated Nazi gangster, the man who created the strategy of terror.Out of the great mass of information he assembled on Goebbels, Curt Riess has constructed a knife-edged portrait of a particularly vicious man.Goebbels came from a small town in the Rhineland. Unlike his later associates in crime and punishment, he went to eight different universities. Shortly after World War I he had his first love affair, he started to read nihilistic philosophers, and had become a definite anti-Semite.In 1922 he heard Hitler speak and immediately joined the National Socialist Party and became its chief propagandist. He turned political rallies into pageants replete with music, flags, and parades championing Hitler as a god.He played an important part in planning the Reichstag fire and was responsible for the Jewish pogroms and later the gas-chamber deaths. And with Machiavellian adroitness he convinced the Germans that war with Poland and the pact with Russia were justifiable. During the war he kept the Germans working with fever pitch by feeding them fantastic stories of their invincibility.This story of a devil's advocate, his political machinations, his love affairs, and his ignominious end, makes exciting and significant reading.

The Trail Led North Mont Hawthorne's Story


Martha Ferguson McKeown - 1948
    

The Secret of Dead Man's Cove - The Further Adventures of The Young Detectives


R.J. McGregor - 1948
    

The Corner That Held Them


Sylvia Townsend Warner - 1948
    Two centuries later, the Benedictine community is well established there and, as befits a convent whose origin had such ironic beginnings, the inhabitants are prey to the ambitions, squabbles, jealousies, and pleasures of less spiritual environments. An outbreak of the Black Death, the collapse of the convent spire, the Bishop's visitation, and a nun's disappearance are interwoven with the everyday life of the nuns, novices, and prioresses in this imagined history of a 14th-century nunnery.