New York Herald Tribune Book Review

Kate's dream of making the Olympic equestrian team is tested by her summer at Langwald's Training Camp

Any future biographical work on Richard Wright will find this bibliography a necessity; academic or public libraries supporting a program of black culture will find it invaluable; and it belongs in any library supporting American literature studies. Richard Wright has truly been well served. Choice The most comprehensive bibliography ever compiled for an American writer, this book contains 13,117 annotated items pertaining to Richard Wright. It includes almost all published mentions of the author or his work in every language in which those mentions appear. Sources listed include books, articles, reviews, notes, news items, publishers' catalogs, promotional materials, book jackets, dissertations and theses, encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, handbooks and study guides, library reports, best seller charts, the Index Translationum, playbills and advertisements, editorials, radio transcripts, and published letters and interviews. The bibliography is arranged chronologically by year. Each entry includes bibliographical information, an annotation by the authors, and information about all reprintings, partial or full. The index is unusually complete and contains the titles of Wright's works, real and fictional characters in the works, entries relating to significant places and events in the author's life, important literary terminology, and much additional information.

Back in the golden age of humor books (late 1920s-early 1950s), when wits of the pantheon like Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and S.J. Perelman were producing their signature works, there was another singular satirist who more than held his own with such fast company: Will Cuppy (1884-1949). This factual funnyman's metier is dark comedy that flirts with nihilism. His agenda is baldly stated in such classic Cuppy book titles as How to Be a Hermit (1929), How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931), and The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950). This biography doubles as a critical study of a satirist whose shish-kebabing of humanity was often done through the veiled anthropomorphic use of animals. For a biographer, Will Cuppy represents a treasure trove of possibilities. He was a great humorist, and most of his best work is still in print, but until now he has never been the subject of a book-length study. His mesmerizingly complex and eccentric private life almost trumps the comic accomplishments of his public persona.

"Harvard faculty and their wives before and during World War II." Cf. Hanna, A. Mirror for the nation

John Dickson Carr is known as the master of the “locked-room” mystery—the “impossible crime.” But Carr also wrote short stories, radio plays, essays, introductions, and book reviews. S. T. Joshi has written the first full-length study of Carr’s entire work and pays particular attention to this author’s three best-known detectives: Henri Bencolin, Dr. Gideon Fell, and Sir Henry Merrivale.