Fairly Civil War

MANY THOUSANDS GONE--John Peale Bishop--Scribner ($2.50).* Not only in biography but, more significantly, in fiction U. S. writers are more & more turning to U. S. subjects. And to a generation that is still scraping off the mud and blood of the War to End War the comparatively chivalrous affair between North and South has an increasingly romantic appeal. These five short stories, with one exception, are tales of the Civil War from the Southern point of view. A Southern farmer comes home to find his mother's grave ripped open by Yankee raiders. He traps them in the cellar, kills them one by one.

A girl watches a wounded Confederate die all night long in her kitchen, gives first her bed and then herself to the exhausted soldier sent to bury him.

A Virginia town has the misfortune to be occupied by troops of a Yankee colonel who was born there; resentful orgies ensue.

Two old maiden ladies after the War find a Negro cook whom they consider a perfect jewel till they discover he is insane. They keep him anyway. "With him they lived in terror, but in the tradition."

The Author. John Peale Bishop, Southerner-born (in Charles Town, W. Va.), of the Princeton generation of Author Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald and Critic Edmund Wilson, seemed to have fallen by the wayside. After college and the War he and Wilson went to Manhattan to play the literary game, ran Vanity Fair together, published a partnered book, The Undertaker's Garland. Then Wilson went on to higher things, Bishop to France and Italy. He lives near Paris in a Louis XIII house. Many Thousands Gone (containing the Scribner $5,000-prize story of that title) is his second book. His first: Green Fruit (poems).

*Published May 8.

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