FOREWORD

For the general idea and design of this book, I am indebted to my friend, Harold Clurman, the director of the Group Theater. During several years, he urged me to publish a collection of my papers similar to “SALVOS” which united certain of my short critical writings from 1915 to 1924. I was always too busy—and the notion of a miscellany does not appeal to me. At last, at his request, I handed him from my files what I could find of my articles and papers published in the past twelve years. I was amazed to find how much it was. Several months later, he returned to me a selection, reduced by two thirds. He pointed out that what he had put in order was not a miscellany but a book with a beginning, a middle and a conclusion: a book even with a “plot”!

The materials that compose this “collective portrait” of an era which spans the Boom, the Depression, and (perhaps) the beginning, in Spain, of the new World War that may end the world we have all lived in, appeared originally in the following periodicals (of New York, unless otherwise noted):

The Adelphi (London), The Dial, Europe (Paris), Harper’s, The Menorah Journal, La Nación (Buenos Aires), The New Masses, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Occidente (Rome), El Repertorio Americano (San José, Costa Rica), Scribner’s, Soviet Russia Today, Sur (Buenos Aires), Virginia Quarterly Review, The Guardian (Philadelphia).

viiiMany other magazines reprinted or translated some of this material, but since I have no full list of these I have not named them.

W. F.

New York, December, 1936

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