Brooklyn Best Seller

THE PURITAN STRAIN--Faith Baldwin --Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

Newest of the group of highly-paid U. S. women romancers who are perennial best sellers (Temple Bailey, Edna Ferber, Kathleen Norris, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Willa Gather) is Brooklyn's vivacious Faith Baldwin.

A smart serialist, like a good businessman, surveys the market, knows what the public wants. When Faith Baldwin had published 28 books, including a dozen best selling romances about modern business women (The Office Wife, Week-End Marriage, Self-Made Woman, White Collar Girl), she decided that her public might like to read a family saga. Mazo de la Roche had made a phenomenal success with her Jalna books. Last year Faith Baldwin plunged into a set of serious novels tracing the development of a typical middle class family from its U. S. beginning to the present. Partly sober realism, partly sugary sentiment, American Family promptly became the best selling of all Faith Baldwin's many best sellers.

Published last week was the second of the series, The Puritan Strain. Shrewdly made up of the time-tested ingredients of the familiar triangle plot, it tells the story of 40-year-old Elizabeth Condit Gates who, like the heroine of many a popular romance, fell high-mindedly in love with her husband's best friend. Author Baldwin takes many liberties with the conventions of sentimental fiction: 1) in showing Elizabeth clinging to her lover despite her regret at the pain she caused her husband; 2) going on with her plans to remarry despite her agony at her son's disapproval of her course; 3) living beyond the usual happy ending of remarriage and accepting her quota of human doubts and regrets.

The Author, Born 42 years ago in New Rochelle, of old U. S. stock somewhat similar to that traced in American Family, Author Baldwin began to write at the age of six, when she turned out a play characteristically called The Deserted Wife. Neighbors in the quiet Fort Hamilton district of Brooklyn knew her as the wife of a Brooklyn businessman, the mother of three sons and a daughter, unobtrusively active in Brooklyn Junior League affairs, when the sensational success of Alimony in 1928 suddenly lifted her from the status of routine magazine contributor to that of a popular favorite.

Small, dark-eyed, prolific Author Baldwin took quick advantage of her first success, and at great speed, using the amateur's hunt and peck system, in the next five years typed out 16 serials as well as many a short story. Her grammar was shaky, her punctuation poor, but rates for her work increased steadily, until she now receives more than $50,000 for each of her magazine serials, is approaching Kathleen Norris' top mark of approximately $75,000 a serial for three serials a year. Unlike Romancer Norris, who can carry on a conversation and manage her household while typing out her novels, Author Baldwin slaves and suffers over her work, cuts and revises in her striving for narrative smoothness and speed. A great admirer of the work of her friend Naomi Mitchison, painstaking historical novelist, Author Baldwin confesses to serious intellectual interests, would rather be "a biologist, an obscure scientist, an actress, a doctor, an explorer" than the most rapidly rising U. S. writer of popular magazine fiction.

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