View: Parade of the Avant-Garde: An Anthology of View Magazine (1940-1947)

As surrealism struggled to sustain its spark in the 1940s, View --the avant-garde magazine edited by poet Ford--attracted many of the most vital writers and artists of the period. A feast of riches, this illustrated anthology spanning the years 1940-1947 includes prose by Max Ernst, Henry Miller, Andre Breton, Paul Bowles and William Carlos Williams; valuable, fresh essays on Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Federico Garcia Lorca, Yves Tanguy and Pavel Tchelitchew; and poems by e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens and Lawrence Durrell, to name a few. As this roster suggests, View's scope went beyond surrealism, embracing many emigre talents who clustered in New York and reproducing artwork by Picasso, Miro, Brancusi, Chagall. Also here are Sartre on the nationalization of literature, Wallace Fowlie on existentialist theater, Paul Goodman on eros. View crackles with verve and originality. First serial to Vanity Fair. (Dec.)