Anything Can Happen

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Good. (c.1941). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a reading/reference copy only, covers somewhat grimy, light-blue scribbling on rear cover, rear hinge starting]. Thirty short stories, some of which had appeared in The New Yorker and The New Republic from 1937 to 1941; the title of each story is a man's name, and an introductory note indicates that each relates the post-high school circumstances of one of a group of classmates. (Some characters are treated in more than one story.) This Hungarian-born author had been a member of the Communist Party during the 1930s, and turned out a couple of proletarian novels, the first of which, "You Can't Sleep Here," prompted one critic to dub him him "the proletarian Hemingway." Those sensibilities are still in evidence in these stories, although after World War II (and service in the Army Air Force), he took a political turn to the right, and by the late 1940s had broken with the Party. . (Inventory #: 26370)