Forthcoming Books
"THOUSANDS of new books," the trade announces, are to be published this autumn. As usual, biography and autobiography predominate; but the books about the war are diminishing. American subjects remain popular; so do some books about Russia, mainly of the escape type.
The correspondence of Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell is edited by Alan Dent (Gollancz), and covers a period from 1889 to 1939 when Mrs. Campbell died. In 1912 and 1913 the two were writing to one another almost every day. The biography of Arnold Bennett by Reginald Pound (Heinemann), already announced, has been delayed through the discovery of fresh material. It is now to be published, and includes the whole Bennett-Wells correspondence which continued a quarter of a century. Another literary friendship is described by Viola Meynell in Francis Thompson and Wilfrid Meynell (Hollis and Carter).
A more remote literary figure is the eighteenth-century Hannah More, the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, Burke and Garrick, whose life, by M. G. Hones, is being published by the Cambridge University Press. Constable is publishing Antoine Lavoisier by Douglas McKie, who has had access to State and family archives for his life of the scientist-economist executed in the French Revolution. Sir James Jeans, whose expositions of modern science are still best-sellers, is the subject of a biography by E. A. Milne (Cambridge University Press), and Whistler— and the art controversy he caused—of a book by Hesketh Pearson (Methuen). G. M. Young's Stanley Baldwin; already announced, will appear this month.
Among autobiographies the first volume of Arthur Koestler's Arrow in the Blue will be published this month by Collins and Hamish Hamilton. This covers the period from Mr. Koestler's birth in 1904 to his joining the Communist Party in 1931—years in which he lived and worked in Vienna, Palestine, Cairo and Berlin, and took part in an air expedition to the North Pole. Lord Macmillan in A Man of Law's Tale (Macmillan) writes reminiscence not only of law but of travel; and Susan Tweedsmuir in The Lilac and the Rose describes her girlhood up to the time she married John Buchan.
History includes The Seven Years of William IV by G. M. Trevelyan (Heinemann) with contemporary cartoons by John Doyle. Among American subjects is The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Gollancz)—a history of the years 1931-51 as seen by "a man,' as the publishers say, "who, perhaps more than any one else, ensured that America accepted her major responsibilities." D. W. Brogan has written Roosevelt and the New Deal (Oxford University Press), a detailed study of Roosevelt's administration between 1929 and his death.
The Dilemma of our Times (Allen and Unwin) is the last book Professor Laski wrote, which he left unfinished. It is being published much as he left it. Heinemann is publishing a series of literary essays, The Vagrant Mood, by Somerset Maugham—studies of the great figures of literature and art.
Postage on this issue: Inland and Overseas 2d.; Canada (Canadian Magazine Post) ld.
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