Corn Bread and Creek Water

THE author of Rabble Rouser — a novel of four years ago that would be a household word if Sinclair Lewis had signed it, as he might have done with self-satisfaction — sums up his latest volume in a subtitle as ‘The Landscape of Rural Poverty.’ It is in essence a vividly descriptive, excitingly original discussion of the American farm problem by a gifted and wide-ranging journalist who cares much more about people than about theories. His definition of farming is the broadest possible one. It includes, for example, lumbering and fishing, which are commonly thought of as industries; Mr. Wilson gets far nearer to their present realities by reconceiving them as techniques of farming applied to forest and sea. What interests him first of all is the rural mind, the rural character, which he always depicts in character sketch and anecdote before translating it into generalization or statistics. What interests him next is the appallingly widespread phenomenon of waste — waste of crops, of land, of human life. Without any rosy optimism, his 300 pages do more than a five-foot shelf of technical sociology to make you feel that the problem of rural poverty is ultimately soluble.