U. S. Giants

HERE'S AUDACITY ! -- Frank Shay--Macaulay ($3).*

Is the U. S. myth-conscious? Not by a long shot, not by many generations. But national-myth-lovers feel a lack, wish to hurry a natural process and supply some U. S. legends readymade. Here is Frank Shay's gallant attempt. He has gathered (and perhaps embroidered) yarns about ten mythical U. S. heroes. Says he: "Their achievements are exaggerations. Their sagas are tales of the impossible. They are as American as our national weakness for boasting. They are, after all, ourselves as we might wish to be." Among Shay's figures are:

Pecos Bill, who roamed the Southwest. Pattern of all cowboy hell-raisers, he was so tough he rode a catamount, used a rattlesnake as quirt.

Texas has Strap Buckner, who found nobody could stand up to his fist. He enjoyed knocking people down, finally got a bit beyond himself and took on the Devil. After that encounter all he could say was: "Skin for skin, skin for skin."

Casey Jones, as all right-thinking men know, was a brave engineer. Minnesinger Shay tacks no embroidery on his tale, contents himself with reprinting a version of the famed ballad beginning, "Come all you rounders if you want to hear."

The whole Northwest claims Brobdingnagian Lumberjack Paul Bunyan, mightiest of loggers, and his blue ox Babe. Together they dug Puget Sound in less than three weeks, using a glacier as a scoop. Paul Bunyan invented the double-bladed ax so that he could fell a tree on every backswing. His grindstone, which he made himself, "was so large that every time it made a single revolution it was pay day." His achievements and appetites were in proportion.

The Author. Frank Shay, onetime Greenwich Village charter member, lives in Provincetown, Mass., Greenwich Villagers' summer colony. He likes conviviality, and has collected several song anthologies : Iron Men and Wooden Ships, My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions, Drawn From the Wood.

Here's Audacity! is boldly illustrated by Artist Eben Given.

*Published Oct. 17.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.