U.S. Prosies

MODERN AMERICAN PROSE--Edited by Carl Van Doren -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

The literary business, like any other, has its entrepreneurs, and they are not all publishers. Editor Carl Van Doren, like Editor Louis Untermeyer, has made his literary name by purveying other men's wares. Friends call him a constructive critic; carpers, a popularizing salesman of U. S. letters. Not the first nor the best U. S. prose anthology, Modern American Prose is one of the biggest (939 pp.). Few readers will agree that all Editor Van Doren's examples deserve to be included in such a collection, or that every example is truthful, beautiful, alive, but nearly every-one will find some of his favorites. Arranged handily in chronological order, Modern American Prose begins with Gertrude Stein (1909), ends with an Epilogue by Editor Van Doren, spanning "the years which may be said to have begun with the Younger Generation and to have ended with the New Deal."

Editor Van Doren has tried to include big, smart or portentous figures of the last 20 years. Some of those present: Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, Willa Gather, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Evelyn Scott, Edith Wharton, Glenway Wescott, Thornton Wilder. Readers may raise puzzled eyebrows at lesser-known names: Carl Becker, Albert Halper, Eleanor Rowland Wembridge. Nowhere to be found are such names as Upton Sinclair, Conrad Allen, Hervey Allen, Louis Bromfield, Walter Lippmann, T. S. Stribling. Looking back on his collection Anthologist Van Doren proudly says: "American literature has grown up. It deals with all the topics that literature deals with anywhere."

The Literary Guild has chosen its editor-in-chief's anthology as its August book.

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