Crackers Collected

WHEN THE WHIPPOORWILL--Marjorie Kinnan Rowlings--Scrlbner ($2.50).

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' collected short stories have good claim to being a better book than her big bestseller, The Yearling. When the Whippoorwill contains eleven stories, including a novelette (Jacob's Ladder) which first put Florida's "scrub" back country on the map and Author Rawlings among the ranks of the South's best regional writers.

With far fewer sentimental soft spots than The Yearling, Author Rawlings' short stones deal with such Florida crackers as starvation-haunted farmers, hunters, trappers, fishermen, moonshiners. Readers of The Yearling know her sharp ear for dialect, her landscapist's feelings for the scrub country. Her short stories show an equal talent for high-spirited folk humor.

The best of them:

>A rabbity couple meet at a dance, flee that night to the woods to become trappers. Unmarried, dogged by hard luck in the shape of game wardens, Federal agents, swindlers, nature, they try fishing, working for a Yankee fruit grower, moonshining, end their hard luck odyssey right where they started.

>Jim Syles's widow, a gentle recluse with a little insurance money, falls for a slick, no-good philanderer half her age. He forces her into the moonshine business, brings home a scrawny girl mistress, who refuses to go away although starved by the widow and abandoned by her lover.

>Two ornery rivals go partners on a stump-sucking, tobacco-chewing, rum-drinking mule, bedevil each other for 30 years by further corrupting the mule in ways that will cause most trouble to the other.

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