Dealing in Futures

The temptation to talk about, uncompleted manuscripts by authors of distinction, or obviously on the way to it, must be resisted as steadfastly as the conjurer refrains from drawing all the tricks from his box at a single pull. Fortunately there are completed manuscripts of which it is now time to speak. One of the most notable of these is Revolutionary New England: 1691-1776, by James Truslow Adams, author of The Founding of New England. Mr. Adams finished his work on this second volume of his remarkable history some months ago. The book itself is now in process of manufacture for autumn publication by the Atlantic Monthly Press. It will be found an entirely worthy sequel to the volume which won Mr. Adams the Pulitzer Prize awarded for the best work in American history in 1921.

The dates ‘1691-1776’ are an essential portion of the title of this new volume, since they indicate clearly the author’s thesis that the American Revolution had its beginnings in New England long before anything resembling a war was contemplated. To this aspect of the matter, the older historians drew scant attention, nor did they concern themselves greatly, if at all, with a consideration of the revolutionary spirit as a force at work, to divisive ends, between the more and the less prosperous classes in New England, just as it was dividing ‘home’ and colony, mother and child. Employing the resources and methods of modern scholarship, Mr. Adams has delved deep into this relatively unfamiliar field of study. With a ripened power of dealing with the materials of history, he has produced a book which will establish him securely in the high place to which his first volume effected his entrance.

Another autumn book, more directly ‘educational’ in purpose, is Social Backgrounds of English Literature, by Ralph Phillip Boas, of the Central High School of Springfield, Massachusetts, who edited the popular ‘Atlantic Classic,’ Youth and the New World, and Miss Barbara Hahn. In this new book, which will be profusely illustrated, the authors discuss the relation between English life and English literature through all the centuries in the history of that literature. The volume embodies to a striking degree the favorite Atlantic theory that literature and life are so closely related that the study of the first without direct reference to the second is unprofitable.

Of another autumn book, of which the manuscript is now in our hands, Miss Montague’s novel, Deep Channel, something has already been said in these pages. Of others, as yet unannounced, there is much to he said in the near future.