AMERICAN WRITERS-A

Series of

Papers Contributed to Blackwood'sMagazine (1824-1825), by Edited with notes and bibliography by Fred Lewis Pattee '88. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1937. Pp. viii, 261. Price $3.00.

John Neal was born in 1793 in Portland, Maine, city where Jack Downing of Downingville, went to sell his famous bundle of ax handles and mother's cheese and Cousin Nabby's bundle of footings and remained to report on the doings of the legislature to the edification of the whole Atlantic seaboard; city, too, of the elegant Willis and the stately Longfellow. John Neal grew up as a Quaker who learned perforce to fight, left Portland for Boston and Baltimore, took a running dive into literature—"to work I went, in the summer of 1816, when I was approaching my twenty-third year, and soon brought forth a story in two volumes, which I christened 'Judge Not by First Appearances.' This title was changed in the following winter to 'Keep Cool,' which appeared June 17, 1817; and then, before the people at large had recovered from their astonishment, I gave them the American Revolution,' by Paul Allen; 'Niagara,' 'Goldau,' and other poems; 'Otho,' a tragedy; a volume or two of miscellaneous magazine and newspaper-essays; the 'lndex to Niles's Register'; 'Logan,' 'Seventy-six,' 'Randolph,' and 'Errata'; and all this, be it remembered, while I was writing voluminously for the Baltimore Telegraph, and preparing for admission to the bar."

After this modest beginning Neal got himself challenged to a duel and presently set out for England, drawn thither, according to his own account, by a burning desire to answer the question that was being raised by contemptuous Englishmen "Who reads an American book?" He went to England as a missionary of American culture and soon had the English periodicals \at his feet. Particularly he had Blackwood's at his feet. Among his contributions to that magazine he published, in 1834-25, the series of five articles on American writers that Professor Pattee has edited and reprinted in the volume at hand.

Neal's attempt was, as Professor Pattee points out, to cover "minutely the whole area of American literature 'from recollection, without a single book to refer to.'" His method was the simple one of listing his American authors (as well as a few painters) alphabetically, and commenting on each. The result is a somewhat amorphous mass of judgments streaked with prejudice and inaccuracy. Yet in a surprising number of instances Neal's verdict has been borne out by time. There is an admirable pen picture of Washington Irving, an excellent treatment of Bryant. Cooper he hardly does justice to; Webster is dismissed somewhat cursorily. Neal is no mincer of words; his expression is bold and vigorous. Poetasters and pretenders fall before his pen. John E. Hall, for instance, he succinctly characterizes as a blockhead and proceeds to quote a verse of Hall's that pretty well proves his point. At times, it must be admitted, the book inspires the somewhat melancholy reflection that at a period when so many American writers were minor writers, there were other American writers who were more minor still. Yet better things were in store. Even as John Neal was contributing these papers to Blackwood's, Hawthorne and Longfellow were young men at Bowdoin, Emerson was a student of divinity, Poe, before long, would enter the U. of Virginia.

Professor Pattee's introduction to the present volume, like all his writings, is a wise blend of the scholarly and the human. In editing the Neal papers he has done a valuable piece of reclamation work, and deserves the thanks of all students of American literature.

—KENNETH A. ROBINSON.

Gordon Barrington '31 is the author of an article What the. Movie Folk Buy forChristmas Gifts which appears in the September issue of the Pacific Drug Re'view. An article of Mr. Barrington's entitled Be Different appears in the September issue of the Cooperative Merchandiser.

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