Replanted

UPROOTED -- Brand Whitlock -- Appleton ($2). You see them wherever you go but especially in Paris and on the Riviera--the uprooted ones, the people without a country, This is not a realistic book about them, for it is full of happy endings, special cases. Yet you can imagine, or you know, what might have befallen a callow, spirited filly like Betty Marsh--whose taste of the wide World during the War made Macochee, Ohio, intolerable and took her back to run her chances among the big hotels, casinos, studios and half-soled, titled Romeos--if she had not finally fallen into the hands of a successful artist and a genuine British dowager. You know what end awaited Mrs. Katherine Mandeville Richardson, the U. S. diplomat's relict, if she had not had the fabulous good fortune to hook the childish millionaire, Samuel Gummidge Bunker, after trickery at roulette had failed her. You even know that not all artists are so comparatively happy, chivalrous and well-heeled as Leslie Waldron, not all dowagers so sensible and friendly as Lady Agnes Drayton. The chances are that Author Whitlock knows too, after eight years as U. S. Minister and Ambassador to Belgium; knows so well that upon his return to novel-writing he finds it less painful, and though less truthful, more pleasing, to make a fiction of uprooted folk who either learned to flourish without soil or were replanted where they belonged.

Brand Whitlock would be a good man to write an Uprooted laid right in the U. S.--the uprooting of small-town folk and their transplanting, with various degrees of success, in big cities. He was born at Urbana, Ohio, 57 years ago, becoming a political correspondent on the old Chicago Record-Herald, and later an assistant to Illinois' Secretary of State at Springfield, what time (1893-97) he tutored in law. Then he went to Ohio, passed its bar requirements and began practicing in Toledo. That town welcomed his vigor and independence, soon (1905) electing him mayor over four other candidates and re-electing him in three successive elections. Then he refused renomination and settled to pursue his literary work, began in 1902. In 1912, he added to his list of seven published stories and essays, The Fall Guy, an interpretation of U. S. life that was dramatized with large success only a couple of seasons ago. His ministry in Belgium began in 1913 and he was working on J. Hardin & Son (published 1923) when war broke out. Belgium (1919) is one of the finest, most understanding documents ever made by a stranger within any one's gates.