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AMERICAN HARVEST, Twenty Years of Creative Writing in the United States --Edited by Allen Tafe and John Peale Bishop--Fischer ($3.50).

The examples of American creative writing packed into American Harvest's 533 pages are being translated into Spanish and Portuguese and will be published in South America under the aegis of the Rockefeller Committee.

There is no Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis in the book; but Dreiser's effects depend on cumulative mass, and Lewis' great talents were not for creative but for reportorial writing. Unfortunately, there is no Scott Fitzgerald, either. The editors also went wrong on Thurber and Willa Gather, who deserved better selections. Southern writers are perhaps too generously treated. With these flaws, it remains a solid anthology. Among the selections:

> The Undefeated, Hemingway's classic story of an aging matador's fight to a finish with a bull who is "all bone."

> Haircut, a barber's monologue to end all barbers and monologues, by Ring Lardner.

> Silent Snow, Secret Snow, by Conrad Aiken, about the most beautiful story of childhood written by an American in the last 20 years.

> The Captive, by Caroline Gordon, a wonderful and little-known story of the Kentucky frontier.

> The Ambiguity of Henry James, by Edmund Wilson, clearing it up.

> Ash Wednesday, by T. S. Eliot, the finest religious poem of the time.

There are also: Sandburg, Saroyan, Wolfe, Dos Passes, Benet, Caldwell, Anderson, Frost. Robinson, Stevens, many others. Say the editors: "It is safe to say that from no other land than ours, within the limits of time we set ourselves, could there have been gathered together a body of writing so various and so vigorous, so serious in intent and so accomplished in craft."

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