Jones, Howard Mumford:

$225 · Offered by William Reese Company

[Lengthy Typed Letter, Signed, about 1952 Candidates for the National Book Award]. A quite interesting, densely typed letter from Jones to William Cole, Moderator of the National Book Award Committee, in which Jones, unable on short notice to attend the meeting of the committee scheduled for the 5th, records at length his ranking of a number of the titles up for consideration for the award, barring Williams's The Build Up, as "I have so far been unable to lay hands on a copy...." He comments on Ellison's Invisible Man (the actual well-deserved winner for its year): "I rate [it] as the least interesting. Its characterization seems to me so frequently crude and grotesque as to be incredible, and the events when they are credible, seem to me to be presented without much finesse...." He rates Steinbeck's East of Eden as above Invisible Man, but notes "it could omit about a third of its bulk and gain in weight... When I compare the control, unity. and fusion of elements in Steinbeck's other (better) novels with this anarchy of style and purpose, its alteration of really bad writing with really good writing, it does not seem to me to be as good as the remaining books I have read." He praises Martin's The Landsmen,"which, I think I was instrumental in putting on the list... It gives me a wonderful sense of humanity, as neither The [sic] Invisible Man nor East of Eden, does, and I think it is rich and full of humanity...." He nonetheless rates it as a structurally just a trifle below

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