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James M. Cain (1892-1977) was hot in 1946 for the hit film adaptations of Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce. The Postman Always Rings Twice was about to open and ads were already running. He was one of that lucky breed of writers who was popular with both readers and critics. Cain was known for his gritty depiction of Depression era Southern California. The setting of his new novel was a major departure. Cain explained to interviewers that he found it difficult writing about wartime society and consequently took a detour into the past. But Publishers Weekly assured booksellers that the plot line of the novel was vintage Cain. The main character was a Confederate spy whose "violent passion for a thieving prostitute drives him into desertion, murder and robbery." It was, Publishers' Weekly assured, Cain at his best and bloodiest.

The advent of the paperback had brought a large new audience to Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987), many of whom had never been regular book readers. God’s Little Acre was among the paperbacks distributed to servicemen. Most of the new fans appreciated the steamy sex scenes. He already had an established fan base before the war. The stage adaptation of Tobacco Road had been a record-breaking success on Broadway but the 1941 film version turned the story into a hillbilly comedy. Not surprisingly, Southern demagogues of the day attacked Caldwell, a native Georgian, for his unflattering depiction of the Southern way of life, denouncing him, incorrectly, as a dirty Commie.

Journalist and short story writer Damon Runyon (1880-1946) had been beloved since the Jazz Age for his depiction of the colorful gamblers and gangsters who hung out at Lindy’s, the Broadway restaurant known for its cheesecake, fictionalized as Mindy’s in his writings. Several of his short stories had been adapted into movies and later two of his stories would become the source of the hit musical “Guys and Dolls.” He was seriously ill by this time in 1946 and died later that year.

John O'Hara (1905-1970) was at the peak of his critical acclaim in the 1940s when the short story was a thriving genre. He would turn out a string of bestselling novels in the 1950s as his critical reputation rapidly sank. The hard-drinking writer was a fixture at elite watering holes like ’21, but his tendency to get into drunken brawls had led him to be 86ed at some.

James T. Farrell (1904- 1979) had been considered a master of the proletarian novel when his Studs Lonigan trilogy about a working class Irish-American in Chicago came out, but his subsequent open disenchantment with the Communist Party had made him the target of the Stalinists who earlier had trumpeted his talent. An ad from his publisher in Publisher’s Weekly this week noted that the “radical intellectuals” were already attacking Bernard Clare which was not due to be published for several weeks. The Sunday Worker, the weekend edition of the Communist Party newspaper, had declared that "the whole course of Farrell's development as an author shows a degeneration paralleling his political degeneration." Stalinists were vicious when it came to apostates.

The 72 year-old Somerset Maugham (1874- 1965) had been around long enough to have dined in his youth with Henry James and Thomas Hardy. The huge success of his 1944 novel, The Razor’s Edge, had fueled an upsurge in interest in Maugham. By the end of 1946, The New York Times reported, 3,000,000 copies of The Razor’s Edge had been sold, counting the later reprint and paperback editions. A major movie version, two years in the making according to studio publicity, with an all-star cast would be released in November 1946 to great fanfare. As the ad in Publishers’ Weekly said, Then and Now, was “a departure from his earlier books” but Doubleday assured booksellers that “the enormous success of The Razor’s Edge ensures an eager market.” The new novel was the June selection of the Literary Guild, the fifth of his novels to have that distinction, almost guaranteeing big sales.To mainstream critics, Maugham was the master of great prose style but modernists found him stodgy and old-fashioned while the Marxist crowd declared that his amoral cynicism kept him from creating true art. This week, Doubleday generated considerable publicity over an April 20 dinner in Maugham’s honor when the writer presented the original manuscript of his masterwork, Of Human Bondage, published in 1915, to the Library of Congress as a thank you for the nation’s wartime hospitality to him and his family. Robert Van Gelder interviewed Maugham in a piece that ran in the The Sunday Times Book Review on April 21. The author told Van Gelder that he had long before sold the rights to Of Human Bondage and many of his other early works so he was making nothing from their continued success. This month, Pocket Books advertised a paperback anthology of Maugham short stories and plays and Avon Books touted a collection of his short stories that had previously run in Cosmopolitan.

Howard Fast (1914- 2003) had created a successful niche for himself as the author of historical fiction from a left-wing perspective. His Thomas Paine was a radical provocateur, a closer representation of the historical figure than the right wing fantasy promoted these days by Glenn Beck. Fast’s Freedom Road told the story of the Reconstruction through the eyes of the newly freed blacks and the Unionists who battled the White Supremacists and plantation elite to help blacks and poor whites gain a political voice.The new novel, The American, was about John Peter Altgeld, the German farmer’s son who became governor of Illinois at the end of the 19th century. Altgeld was a political reformer and a leader of the Progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. His enemies crucified him for pardoning three anarchists who had been convicted of involvement in the Haymarket Riots in which several policemen were killed. Fast frames Altgeld’s story as a battle between the proletariat and the corrupt Robber Barons. In real life, Altgeld was a successful businessman and not as radical as Fast depicted. Although many critics did not agree with Fast’s take on history, he was admired for his passionate, compelling storytelling. In April, The Literary Guild, a mainstream, mass market organization, announced that The American would be its August selection. Within a year, this would be unthinkable. Fast, raised in poverty by Jewish immigrant parents, had been a Communist Party member since 1943 and was an editor of The New Masses, the Party’s literary and current events magazine, and later managing editor of The Daily Worker. He was a passionate defender of Stalin and the Soviet Union and the recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize. In 1947, after the anti-Communist rhetoric heated up, Fast fell afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Columbia University, City College and Brooklyn College barred him from speaking to student groups on the campus and the Board of Education ordered the removal of Citizen Tom Paine from school libraries. Fast continued writing in the postwar era, self-publishing one of his best known novels, Spartacus. He left the Party in 1957 after the Soviet government revealed Stalin’s crimes. He continued to be a prolific writer until his death in 2003.

The avant-garde crowd was looking forward to the summer release of Gertrude Stein’s (1874-1946) newest work, a dialogue between two American soldiers in post-liberation Paris. It had recently been staged as a play in Los Angeles. A visit to Stein’s salon had been a must since the Jazz Age for literary types who visited Paris and soldiers with writerly ambitions lucky enough to visit the city resumed the pilgrimage after the liberation. Random House had recently announced the upcoming publication of an omnibus of her works. Brewsie and Willie came out two weeks before Stein’s death from stomach cancer. Stein sharply divided readers. Some mainstream critics felt that she wrote self indulgent, meaningless blabber while the literati declared that she brilliantly explored language. It helped that her inherited wealth allowed her to cultivate a circle of prominent writers and artists who became her champions. Her new work, a slight volume, was written in a more naturalistic style. Stein’s wartime life is a continued area of controversy. Although she and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, were Jewish Americans, they somehow lived unmolested in France during the Nazi years, which some historians attribute to their collaboration with the Vichy government. Despite her literary radicalism, her anti-establishment lifestyle and left-wing friends, Stein was surprisingly politically conservative. She was a lifelong Republican. Early in the 1930s she had written approvingly of the Fascists while disparaging FDR and the New Deal. Brewsie and Willie is in print.

Upton Sinclair (1978-1968) wrote almost 100 books over his long life, but was best known for his muckraking novels, The Jungle (1907) and Oil! (1927), as well as for his unsuccessful run on a Socialist platform as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934. The hero of Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series was the suave Socialist son of a wealthy arms dealer who managed to be in the middle of most of the major international events of the first half of the twentieth century. The third installment, Dragon’s Teeth, which dealt with the rise of the Nazis, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943, but three years later, after a book a year, the critics had grown weary of the verbose saga. However, the series continued to draw readers. The upcoming novel covered the period from 1940 to 1942 in 600 pages. The series would eventually reach eleven volumes in 1953. The book is in print.

Critics had hailed William Saroyan as the energetic, optimistic voice of the common man when he burst on the scene during the Depression but by 1946 a backlash was underway. Known at first for his short stories, he later turned to the stage, winning and rejecting the Pulitzer Prize for his 1939 play, The Time of Your Life, on the grounds that commercial interests had no business judging art. He came to Hollywood after gambling away his money and won an Academy Award for The Human Comedy, an MGM film starring Mickey Rooney in a dramatic role. Saroyan had creative differences with MGM's treatment of his original story and addressed them by publishing a novelized version that became a bestseller. Meanwhile he was churning out a string of plays, most of which never made it past summer tryouts. Saroyan was an individualist who rejected efforts by the Communist Party and its sympathizers to add him to their roster of proletarian writers. While he attacked the importance that some put on money and status, he valued self-reliance and saw people for the most part as a pretty decent lot who could work things out for themselves when left alone by the rich, the powerful, the bigoted and the ideological. But, unlike the Ayn Rand libertarians, his sympathy was for the downtrodden and life's failures. The Left responded to his cold shoulder by attacking his supposed lack of social conscience and his sentimentality. The New York critical establishment, led in their attacks by Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson and Diana Trilling, joined the fray, criticizing him for a lack of intellectual and artistic discipline. To them he seemed to throw down whatever crossed his mind without concern for cohesion or structure, often lapsing into pontification and generalizations like a drunk in a bar or a child showing off. They found his idealism naive, his work awash with mush. On his part, he rejected those critics who told him what he should write. His defenders said the strength of his work was that it was deliberately emotional rather than cerebral and coldly analytical, the approach the literati championed. The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, based on Saroyan's war experience was already arousing controversy before it hit the market. He wrote it in 1944 while stationed in London. Saroyan hated of the Army and the war. He had been drafted as a buck private and although he had it soft, serving first in Astoria, living most of the time at the Lombardy Hotel, and then in London, where he hobnobbed with the literary set and shared an office and a flat with fellow author Irwin Shaw, he resented his time in the service as an intolerable imposition on his freedom. The Army saw his novel with its tirades against the war and the US military as just short of treason. The book would be lambasted from all sides when it came out and Saroyan’s reputation continued its fall. Some present day critics, however, see him as a major literary figure of the mid-twentieth century.