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The article discusses books, authors and American humor. I find it difficult to bust into roars of laughter over the long- winded racket of the majority of old- time humorists writer Constance Rourke has written about. I am not a passionate devotee of Sut Lovingood. But from those days to writer, Henry Mencken, these were the qualities that made American humor American. It was just plain lack of style that made it, in so many cases, tedious. This, once, was the blood and bone of our very own life. Out of it came our one epic hero, the only American who can walk with Ajax and Odysseus-Huck Finn.

This article focuses on poet Samuel Beckett. Beckett's first published work was a six-page poem, "Whoroscope." This poem remained one of Beckett's main themes. And the point of view has never changed. That is, he has carefully pared away from what they call his universe of discourse everything except those questions which cannot be answered. He gives plenty of answers-Pozzo and Lucky in Godot -the sempiternal master and man, are of course an answer. And, of course, an irrelevant answer. They owe their existence, as does all the matter of Beckett's art, to their irrelevance.

Henry Miller is a really popular writer, a writer of, for, and by real people. In other countries, he is read, not just by highbrows, or by the wider public that reads novels, but by the people who, in the United States, read comic books. In the United States, he has been kept away from a popular public and his great novels have been banned. The people Henry Miller writes about, read him. They read him because he gives them something they cannot find elsewhere in print. It may not he precisely !the real world, but it is nearer to it than most other writing, and it is certainly nearer than most so-called realistic writing.

This article focuses on the book "The Sicilian Vespers," by Steven Runciman. From the very beginning of his career it has been apparent that Runciman is a historian of no mean order. He has done the thing all modern historians hope to do, and almost none manages, he has combined the writing, of history as literature and the study of history as a scholarly discipline, if not an exact science. His subject this time is the thirteenth-century struggle for supremacy among the states and cities of the Mediterranean, a struggle which centered in Sicily, but spread as far as Germany and the Holy Land, and which was watched with more than neutral interest by the powers of England and France.

The article presents books and authors. In the last few years, three books on Chinese philosophy by Fung Yu-lan have appeared. The first volume of this "History" was originally published in Peking shortly before the change in regime, and a few copies got out to the West. The others are "The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy" and "A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, translated by E. R. Hughes and Derk Bodde respectively. Now these are very impressive auspices. Hughes and Bodde are among the top Sinologists of the present day, and both are specialists, of somewhat different points of view, in Chinese philosophy. Both are excellent translators. They have really carried across the special processes of Chinese thought without producing pidgin English.

This article focuses on the book "The Lost Cities of Africa," by Basil Davidson. It is both a sound historical and archaeological work and very exciting reading. The "Lost Cities of Africa" is the is a systematic, scientific and thoroughly up-to-date presentation of the history, prehistory, archaeology and prehistoric anthropology or human paleontology of all of Africa, except for the Moorish-Arab Northwest corner. All the major centers of civilization are treated in considerable detail. Since most of the material is archaeological and not literary, a history of Africa must perforce be a social and economic history rather than a political one.

Profiles William Golding, a British novelist. His reputation as an author; Analysis of his works; Interpretation to his style in writing.