Word: written
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Eden in 1952. (There were those who loved it, but it flopped.) To get over that humiliation, Playwright Hart began to jot down his recollections. With great skill and an understanding gentleness toward stage folk that all good men harbor for children and the feebleminded, Moss Hart has written one of the best memoirs of this or any other theatrical generation...
Though it was written to get away from playwriting. Act One (Random House; $5) in a sense is still a play. It is a collection of fascinating characters whom the author parades before the footlights of his wit and warmth. There is first of all the character who dominated Moss Hart's poverty-ridden Bronx childhood: a grandfather, whom a casual neighbor might well have regarded as simply an embittered, ill-tempered old cigar maker, pathetically attached to his past friendship with the great labor leader, Sam Gompers. But in Moss Hart's telling, he becomes "an Everest...
Novelist Auchincloss, who has written this sort of book before (The Great World and Timothy Colt, Venus in Sparta), knows his forms and his upper-crust Long Islanders. His description of Esther and the other Parmelee Cove women pursuing the adulterers like a chorus of Eumenides has the rasp of accurate reporting. But if Reese's predicament is real, he himself is sometimes the sort of hero scissored by children from the backs of cereal boxes. His incessant wrestling with the devil is a little sophomoric, and his escape from Parmelee Cove shows the limits of even the best...
...Upstairs (English). A taut, offbeat thriller, crisply written and directed, about a psychotic scientist holed up on the top floor of a rooming house, and how his fellow lodgers coax him into coming down...
More Than Meets the Eye, by Carl Mydans. A vivid written account (no pictures) by a crack photographer of nearly a quarter-century spent covering the world's battlefronts...