Culture Salesman

Best-known and most ebullient of U.S. lecturers on the drama, New York World-Telegram Critic John Mason Brown annually faces clubwomen in most of the 48 States, spends as many nights in hotel rooms as in his own bed. The gusto he throws into his lecturing he has also thrown into a book about it. Accustomed As I Am (Norton; $2) makes amusing copy of a lecturer's occupational hazards.

Of all the slips of paper sent up to him during "question period," Brown's favorite is one, submitted at the end of a very highbrow discourse, that read: "Will the speaker be so good as to give me Carmen Miranda's telephone number?"

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