UPCOMING BOOKS BY FAMOUS AUTHORS
One of the often reiterated complaints about the literary scene in 1946 was that the established heavyweights like Hemingway, Steinbeck or Faulkner had produced no new works. However, the book industry trades like Publisher’s Weekly were filled this week with publishers' ads for upcoming books by well-known writers of the day. Reviewers later would dismiss most of these titles as falling short of their authors’ standards. It was as if the war and its recent conclusion had left writers at a loss. Meanwhile the admittedly short postwar period was yet to produce any major new writers in the eyes of the mainstream critics.
Here are some of the works from established writers that publishers had announced by this week in April 1946:
AUTHOR
James M. Cain
Erskine Caldwell
Damon Runyon
John O’Hara
James T. Farrell
Somerset Maugham
Howard Fast
Gertrude Stein
Upton Sinclair
William Saroyan
KNOWN FOR
Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, The Postman Always Rings Twice
Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre
Short stories and journalism
Appointment in Samarra, Butterfield 8, Pal Joey
The Studs Lonigan trilogy
Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge
Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
The Jungle, Oil!
The Time of Your Life, The Human Comedy
UPCOMING TITLE
PLOT
A Confederate spy in a frontier town during the Civil War.
A decadent, aristocratic Southern family.
Collection of sports and show business columns.
Anthology of short stories and novellas.
First in a new trilogy about a young writer’s experience with the Communist Party.
Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia match wits in 16th century Florence.
Fictionalized biography of John Peter Altgeld, the German farmer’s son who became governor of Illinois at the end of the 19th century.
Conversation between two American soldiers in Paris after its liberation.
The seventh volume in the Lanny Budd saga which took its main character through the principal events of the century. This installment covered 1940-42.
Anti-war novel based on the author’s experience as a draftee.