Best of
American

1946

The Street


Ann Petry - 1946
    Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.

Pavilion of Women


Pearl S. Buck - 1946
    The House of Wu, one of the oldest and most revered in China, is thrown into an uproar by her decision, but Madame Wu will not be dissuaded and arranges for a young country girl to come take her place in bed. Elegant and detached, Madame Wu orchestrates this change as she manages everything in the extended household of more than sixty relatives and servants. Alone in her own quarters, she relishes her freedom and reads books she has never been allowed to touch. When her son begins English lessons, she listens, and is soon learning from the foreigner, a free-thinking priest named Brother Andre, who will change her life. Few books raise so many questions about the nature and roles of men and women, about self-discipline and happiness.

The Portable Faulkner


William Faulkner - 1946
    No single volume better conveys the scope of Faulkner's vision than The Portable Faulkner. Edited by Malcolm CowleyContents:The Old PeopleThe UnvanquishedThe Last WildernessThe PeasantsThe End of an OrderMississippi FloodModern TimesThe Undying Past

Last Chapter


Ernie Pyle - 1946
     After covering the war from the British home front to North Africa, Italy, and France, he left the European Theater to go to the Pacific to cover what would be the last few months of conflict with the Japanese forces. Instead of recounting the discussions and activities of generals or the movements of armies, Pyle captured the daily lives of the common soldier and showed the public how their brothers, fathers and sons were experiencing the war. Rather than covering the war from safety, he threw himself into the heat of battle so that he could fully understand and record what the fighting men were going through. Last Chapter is a collection of his last articles that he wrote while witnessing the conflict in the Pacific. During his time in the Far East he spent time in the occupied Marianas, with pilots and aircrew of B-29’s as they flew in missions over the Japanese mainland, with sailors in the hundreds of boats that were swarming the Pacific Ocean, and with marines as they were preparing for the assault of Okinawa. "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told", wrote Harry Truman. "He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen." “These pages will of course have a commemorative value, mark an end to one of the best known, best loved figures of the war.” Kirkus Reviews Ernie Pyle was the most celebrated war correspondent of World War Two. His work ran in one-hundred and forty-four papers and reached an audience of forty million Americans. His brilliant portrayal of the everyday fighting man in World War Two won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. Last Chapter was first published in 1946 after Pyle had been killed at Ie Shima on 18th April, 1945.

The Bear That Wasn't


Frank Tashlin - 1946
    Sit down with the book and get your own bearings." — New York Herald TribuneWith the first signs of approaching winter, the Bear's thoughts naturally turn to a cozy cave and a long snooze till spring. But when he awakes a few months later, he is surprised to find himself smack dab in the middle of a sprawling industrial complex! To make matters even worse, every one he meets keeps insisting that he's not even a bear--just a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat.Written by the beloved director of such classic screwball comedies as The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, this wryly humorous tale has long been an underground favorite with readers of all ages and attitudes. Poking fun at a fast-paced, high-tech society, it follows the Bear's repeated attempts of finding out just where he belongs. On an assembly line? In a zoo? At the circus? No one seems to know for sure.Tashlin's 46 delightfully original and whimsical illustrations add to the charm of this unique and entertaining fable.

Paterson


William Carlos Williams - 1946
    Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of the Passaic River" from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Christopher MacGowan, who has supplied a wealth of notes and explanatory material.

All the King's Men


Robert Penn Warren - 1946
    Willie Stark, Warren’s lightly disguised version of Huey Long, the one time Louisiana strongman/governor, begins as a genuine tribune of the people and ends as a murderous populist demagogue. Jack Burden is his press agent, who carries out the boss’s orders, first without objection, then in the face of his own increasingly troubled conscience. And the politics? For Warren, that’s simply the arena most likely to prove that man is a fallen creature. Which it does.

The Neon Wilderness


Nelson Algren - 1946
    They don't fade away. - Studs Terkel, from the AfterwordOnce more I have been impressed by Algren's talent, his probity and his command of a tough language that he transforms into a raw and bleeding poetry. - Malcolm Cowley in The NationSince the publication on The Neon Wilderness... Nelson Algren has been acknowledged as a master of that American Realism touched with poetry, which attempts to give voice to the insulted and injured. He is a philosopher of deprivation, a moral force of considerable dimensions and a wonderful user of the language - Donald BarthelmeMr Algren, boy you are good - one of the two best authors in America - Ernest Hemingway

The Portable Emerson


Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1946
    The Portable Emerson comprises essays, including “History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” and “The Poet”; Emerson’s first book, Nature, in its entirety; twenty-two poems, including “Uriel,” “The Humble-Bee,” and “Give All to Love”; orations, including “The American Scholar,” “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and “John Brown”; English Traits, complete; and biographical essays on Plato, Napoleon, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Carlyle, and others.

Hawthorne's Short Stories


Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1946
    Introduction by Professor Newton Arvin of Smith College.The gray champion -- The minister's black veil -- The may-pole of Merry Mount -- Wakefield -- The great carbuncle -- The prophetic pictures -- Lady Eleanore's mantle -- Old Esther Dudley -- The ambitious guest -- The white old maid -- Peter Goldthwaite's treasure -- Endicott and the red cross -- The birthmark -- Young Goodman Brown -- Rappaccini's daughter -- The celestial railroad -- Feathertop : a moralized legend -- Egotism, or, The bosom serpent -- The artist of the beautiful -- The great stone face -- Ethan Brand -- The wives of the dead -- The antique ring -- Alice Doane's appeal.

Shadow on the Trail


Zane Grey - 1946
    With a beard and a new name, Wade becomes a legend as a feared and respected gunman. But his life could very well end on the Arizona ranch of the only woman he'd ever die for.

Southern California: An Island on the Land


Carey McWilliams - 1946
    and It Does That By Looking At Personalities As Diverse As Helen Hunt Jackson To Aimee Semple McPherson, Huntington The Finan- Cier To Hatfield The Rainmaker.

Spoonhandle


Ruth Moore - 1946
    She knows Maine and its people, especially their humor, for this novel is rich with the indigenous humor of the Maine coast. Spoondhandle is a heartening book, alive and evocative, the product of an artist sure of her material, certain and marvelously clear, able to give a main character his head and spin him out to full length.Miss Moore writes of a Maine community, especially of the Stilwells. She depicts Pete Stilwell and his sister Agnes, who wanted money and thought they could get it by siding with the summer people against their neighbors, and their brothers, Willie and Hod, who lived on Little Spoon Island and fished for a living.

Sleepers Awake


Kenneth Patchen - 1946
    A work of extraordinary imaginative invention, it might be described as “novelistic fantasy”—a pioneering new direction in fiction which created its own protean form as it was written. Patchen mingled narrative with dream visions, surrealism with satire, poetry with statements of principle, and explored the then almost uncharted territory of visual word structures twenty years before “Concrete Poetry” became a popular international movement.Sleepers Awake is a rallying cry to young and old, as Patchen advances his long struggle against inhumanity, oppression, war and hypocrisy. Now brutal, now lyrical, he gives us life and the world as we must take these if they are to have full meaning; the horror and the beauty, the joy and the suffering together.

Evidence


Isaac Asimov - 1946
    It was first published in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections I, Robot (1950), The Complete Robot (1982), and Robot Visions (1990).Many people choose to see Asimov's treatment of technophobia as an allegory to the antisemitism with which he was bitterly familiar; he wrote Evidence during Army service shortly after World War II.

The Foxes of Harrow (Delta Diamond Library)


Frank Yerby - 1946
    He gambled, won and built "Harrow," the greatest mansion house and plantation in Louisiana. He took the love of three women: Odalie Orceneaux, his wife; her sister, Aurore; and Desiree, his Black mistress. Fox had a child by each of them. This story is charged with blood and passion and strife between the races.

Weegee's People


Weegee - 1946
    Beginning his career on the police beat where he specialized in crime and catastrophe, Weegee roamed the city during the 1930s and ’40s in search of the Page One photo: the image that would stop you at the newsstand.He was among the first to fully realize the camera’s unique power to capture split-second drama and exaggerated emotion. But his profound influence on other photographers, most famously on Diane Arbus, derives not only from his sensational subject matter and his use of the blinding, close-up flash, but also from his eagerness to photograph the city at all hours, at all levels: coffee shops at three in the morning, hot summer evenings in the tenements, debutante balls, parties in the street, lovers on park benches, the destitute and the lonely. No other photographer has better revealed the non-stop spectacle of life in New York City.Weegee’s first book, Naked City (1945), was a runaway success and made him a celebrity who suddenly had assignments from Life and Vogue. By the publication of his second book, Weegee’s People (1946, he had cut the wires to his police radio and had begun to photograph the furred and bejeweled grandes dames at the Metropolitan Opera as well as his beloved street people. Naked Hollywood (1953) and Weegee by Weegee (1961) feature portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khruschev, and Liberace—many of them viewed through the distorted lens of his Weegee-scope.Regarded as some of the most powerful images of 20th-century photography, Weegee’s work now resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Vintage Season


Henry Kuttner - 1946
    L. Moore [as by Lawrence O'Donnell]First publication: Astounding Science Fiction, September 1946

Nightmare Alley


William Lindsay Gresham - 1946
    Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.

The Sound and The Fury / As I Lay Dying


William Faulkner - 1946
    

My Country School Diary: An Adventure in Creative Teaching


Julia Weber Gordon - 1946
    

The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Arthur Rimbaud


Henry Miller - 1946
    The social function of the creative personality is a recurrent theme with Henry Miller, and this book is perhaps his most poignant and concentrated analysis of the artist's dilemma.

Slight Rebellion off Madison


J.D. Salinger - 1946
    

The Zebra Derby


Max Shulman - 1946