Caravan

THE NEW AMERICAN CARAVAN--Edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, Paul Rosenfeld--Macaulay ($3.50).

The American Caravan, first appearing in 1927, put out by its present board of editors and Critic Van Wyck Brooks, aimed to provide a "literary ferment" by publishing samples of the more advanced American literature, which otherwise readers of the Red Book might never know existed. The scheme took. The American Caravan has become an annual fixture. Among its contributors have been: Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Scott, Morley Callaghan, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Paul Green. Authors Evelyn Scott and Paul Green are again represented in the present edition.

The Caravan usually has something very good in it: this time it is a long poem by Phelps Putnam, The Daughters of the Sun, too long to quote, too good to quote from. Of the newcomers, William Rollins Jr.'s short novel, The Obelisk, is a painfully accurate account of adolescence's nightmares. Erskine Caldwell's Midsummer Passion is a Chekhovian incident of yokel bawdiness and embarrassment, e. e. cummings, noted licentiate of verse, has some fun with prose and prose ideas. Paul Green contributes a full-length play, Tread the Green Grass. There are eleven short stories (so called for convenience); 44 poems, and an essay by Critic Yvor Winters, The Extension and Reintegration of the Human Spirit through the Poetry, Mainly French and American, Since Poe and Baudelaire.

The New Caravan is an interesting, sometimes an amusing, volume. It should shock more people than professors. This edition is an improvement on the two previous ones by being somewhat smaller.