Minority Report

MR. DEVOTO’S many friends who have followed his work as an editorial writer for Harper's Magazine and the Saturday Review will take pleasure in this volume of reprints; and those who have not already read his pages are well advised to make their acquaintance in this form. They represent about the best that the America of these days can show in the way of literary journalism. Mr. De Voto writes well in a style approaching the Corinthian rather than the Attic; he is well informed; and he has a ready fund of hard good sense. His good sense is not so imperturbable as Benjamin Franklin’s, unfortunately, so he is often led to waste a great deal of valuable TNT on nonmilitary objectives; that is to say, on men and things which are not worth his attentions. Still, he writes professedly as a journalist, and journalism must perforce take up chiefly with ephemeral matters; moreover, his lively bombing raids always give the spectator a wicked sort of pleasure in their effectiveness. Enough is enough, however, even of journalism as good and as stirring as Mr. DeVoto’s. One hopes that the promise hinted at in his preface will be made good, and that he is ready now to set his fine abilities at work in some less arid portion of the literary field.