April 1957
In This Issue
Explore the April 1957 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
The United Nations
Sweden
Health Insurance and the American Public
The great expansion of voluntary health insurance in recent years is part of a significant but little not iced social and economic transformation in the United States. The president of the Health Insurance Association of America tells how the insurance companies have pioneered in the development of sound principles and techniques of protecting millions of families and individuals against the high cost of ill health and loss of income.
China: Time for a Policy
Writer and teacher, JOHN K. FAIRBANK traveled widely in China for seven years and lectured at Tsing Hua Lniversity, Peking, before coming to Harvard as Professor of History. During the war he served as Special Assistant to the American Ambassador in Chungking, and later as Director of the USIS in China. He is the author of The United States and China, 1948 and coauthor of A Documentary History of Chinese Communism, 1952, and China s Response to the West, 1954, all published by the Harvard University Press.
Science and Industry
Captain King of Texas: The Man Who Made the King Ranch
For four years TOM LEA, the artist and author of El Paso, has been absorbed in writing and illustrating his incomparable two-volume history of the King Ranch. His hero is Richard King, son of an Irish immigrant, who shipped south as a stowaway in his twelfth year; who made his reputation as a steamboater on the Rio Grande, and who came ashore in his late twenties to become a cattle baron oj Texas. Two friends figured significantly in his early careen Mifflin Kenedy, his Quaker partner, and Lt. Got. Robert E. Gee, Second Cavalry, USA. then serving on the Mexican border. This is the first of two installments.
Pay and the Professor
As he looks ahead to the ever-increasing undergraduate enrollment, BEARDSLEY RUML asks whether the teaching load and the deteriorating economic position of liberal college professors are being dealt with as wisely as possible. Mr. Ruml has a long training in financial problems, having served for varying periods with the Carnegie Corporation; as Director of the eighty-million-dollar Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial; as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York City and of R. H. Macy Company. He was Professor of Education and Dean of the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago from 1931 to 1933.
The Voyage
Pericles on 34th Street
After ten years of writing and rejection, HARRY MARK PETRAKIS hit our target right in the center with this pungent starv. Mr. Pet raids is thirty-three years old, married, anti has two young sons. When yon are in your early ttreaties,” he wrote, publication seems a story away. It is only later that you learn the obligations of talent. You learn that no one can really do for you that which has to be done. Yon learn what it means to try to balance the wanting to write within the nomad patterns of life and family. From arrogance you come full circle to humility when for days oral weeks and even months there appears to be no sane reason for continuing.”
The Writing of Ulysses: Letters of James Joyce
An Irish novelist born in 1882, JAMES JOYCE had a greater influence upon twentieth-century literature than any wher novelist of our time. He spent his boyhood in Dublin, was educated in Jesuit schools and colleges, and at the age of twenty broke away from family and church to live and write as a free lance on the Continent. The heartbreaking difficulties which he encountered in writing his magnum opus are revealed in what follows. This is the second of two installments which the Atlantic is privileged to draw from Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert, to Be published by the Viking Press.
The Cold-Cure Merry-Go-Round
The common cold, as DR. DAVID D. RUTSTEIN says, is the most common disease of mankind. Year after year the American public has been offered miracle drugs, and again and again the people have been disappointed. How does this come about? Head of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Rutstein is a member of the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital and five other Boston hospitals.
Writers and Motion Pictures
ELIA KAZAJN graduated from Williams College in 1930, studied at the Yale Drama School, and joined the Group Theatre as an apprentice actor. After some years of stage managing and walk-ons, he scored a hit in Golden Boy, hut then stopped acting to direct, first in the theatre and later in films. Of the twenty-odd plays which he has directed, the best-remembered are The Skin of Our Teeth, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Tea and Sympathy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; of the motion pictures, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentleman’s Agreement, Streetcar again, On the Waterfront, and the current and controversial Baby Doll. In preparation is A Face in the Crowd, for the published version of which this article serves as an introduction.
The Rock Pool
Mr. Justice Holmes Seeks His Friends
MARK DEWOLFE HOWE, who has been Professor of Law at Harvard since 1945, was Secretary to Justice Holmes during the year before the Justice’s death in 1935. He has edited two collections of Holmes’s letters the correspondence with Sir Frederick Pollock and that with Harold Laski. He is the “authorized" biographer of Holmes, and Justice Holmes: The Shaping Years, 181-1-.1870, the first volume of his projected three-volume biography, was published by the Harvard Universify Press last month. The following brief memoir opens up a glimose of one aspect of Holmes’s maturity.
Spring Day
A poem
God and Success
Americans have always been responsive to revivalists and to those who seek to popularize religion. But recently, as CURTIS CATE points out, the glorification of commercial success has been added to godliness in a way to make us somewhat skeptical of the new piety. Mr. Cate, who was born in France and educated at Harvard and Oxford, is now on the editorial staff of the Atlanlic.
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
Accent on Living
Men and Machines
Now a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, DONALD HALL was previously at Christ Church, Oxford. His book of poems, Exiles and Marriages, was published in this country in Woo.
In a Manner of Speaking
Departmentalized
RUTH ALDRICH tenches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This is her first appearance in the Atlantic.
Irritant Incarnate
The Mozart Year
JOHN M. COMA is a former New York and Washington news paper man, now editor of High Fidelity Magazine. “They Shall Hare Manic” is a quarterly feature in the Atlantic.
