Classics and commercials: [electronic resource] a literary chronicle of the forties.

"A selection of ... literary articles written during the nineteen forties."

Archibald MacLeish and the word -- Van Wyck Brooks's second phase -- The boys in the back room: James M. Cain ; John O'Hara ; William Saroyan ; Hans Otto Storm ; John Steinbeck ; Facing the Pacific -- Max Eastman in 1941 -- T.K. Whipple -- The antrobuses and the earwickers -- Alexander Woollcott of the phalanx -- The poetry of Angelica Balabanoff -- Mr. Joseph E. Davies as a stylist -- Thoughts on being bibliographed -- Through the embassy window: Harold Nicolson -- Kay Boyle and the Saturday Evening Post -- The life and times of John Barrymore -- "Never apologize, never explain": the art of Evelyn Waugh -- John Mulholland and the art of illusion -- What became of Louis Bromfield -- J. Dover Wilson on Falstaff -- A toast and a tear for Dorothy Parker -- A treatise on tales of horror -- A guide to Finnegans wake -- A novel by Salvador Dali -- A long talk about Jane Austen -- "You can't do this to me!" shrilled Celia -- Aldous Huxley in the world beyond time -- Vladimir Nabokov on Gogol -- Katherine Anne Porter -- A picture to hang in the library: Brooks's Age of Irving -- Why do people read detective stories? -- Bernard Shaw on the training of a statesman -- Reexamining Dr. Johnson -- Leonid Leonov: the sophistication of a formula -- Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? -- "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" -- Glenway Wescott's war work -- A cry from the unquiet grave -- Tales of the marvellous and the ridiculous -- Thackeray's letters: a Victorian document -- Splendors and miseries of Evelyn Waugh -- George Saintsbury's centenary -- Ambushing a best-seller -- The apotheosis of Somerset Maugham -- William Saroyan and his darling old Providence -- Oscar Wilde: "One must always seek what is most tragic" -- George Grosz in the United States -- An old friend of the family: Thackeray -- Gilbert without Sullivan -- George Saintsbury: gourmet and glutton -- Books of etiquette and Emily Post -- A dissenting opinion on Kafka -- Jean-Paul Sartre: the novelist and the existentialist -- The musical glasses of Peacock -- Edith Wharton: a memoir by an English friend -- The sanctity of Baudelaire -- Van Wyck Brooks on the Civil War period -- An analysis of Max Beerbohm -- The original of Tolstoy's Natasha -- "The most unhappy man on Earth" -- William Faulkner's reply to the civil-rights program -- In memory of Octave Mirbeau -- A revival of Ronald Firbank -- Paul Rosenfeld: three phases.