These United States: Portraits of America from the 1920s

From 1922 to 1925, the Nation 's managing editor, Ernest Gruening, persuaded 48 American authors to write about their native states for the magazine. This singularly valuable volume, edited by a University of Rochester (N.Y.) history professor, reprints all the essays, plus an article on New York City by Gruening. Willa Cather (Nebraska) and Dorothy Canfield Fisher (Vermont) strike two of the very few positive notes. In more typical pieces, H. L. Mencken attacks the Maryland ``booboisie,'' Sherwood Anderson condemns Ohio money-grubbers and Edmund Wilson decries the commuters intruding on peaceful New Jersey townssuburbs a postwar concept, and commuters' intrusion was precisely what made towns into suburbs . Sinclair Lewis, the scourge of Minnesota, and Theodore Dreiser, complaining about Indiana, nevertheless admit to fond if grudging feelings for their points of origin. W.E.B. Du Bois's impassioned polemic supporting the advancement of blacks in Georgia makes even more shocking by contrast Beulah Amidon Ratcliff's overtly ? quote suggests racism is pretty overt/right, can't get much more overt that these quotes.gs racist article blaming ``lazy, immoral niggers'' for Mississippi's backwardness. The juxtaposition of such strikingly individual voices makes for ? entertaining and informative reading. ( June )