Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. In "Some Notes on River Country," we see "the little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez" where "the houses merge into a shaggy fringe at the foot of the bluff." In the childhood memoir "The Little Store" she tells us: "I believed the Little Store to be a center of the outside world, and hence of happiness-as I believed what I found in the Crackerjack box to be a genuine prize, which was as simply as I believed in the Golden Fleece." These pieces clarify Eudora Welty's presence: in life, as in her writings, she is self-possessed but never self-absorbed. The last, purely personel section includes her introduction to a cookbook of Jackson recipes and the preface to a collection of her own Mississippi photographs, One Time, One Place, as well as several vignettes of local scenes. Miss Welty can be tart, as when she judges Arthur Mizener's book on Ford Maddox Ford inadequate-because Ford deserved a better book. "Jane Austen loved high spirits, she had them herself, and she always rejoiced in the young." Of Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man: "what gives me special satisfaction about it is that no one but a good writer - this good writer - could possibly have brought it off." Other enthusiasms are Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, and, from many years back, S.J. She makes the engaging assumption that her readers are as interested and knowledgeable about these problems as she is herself, and that they too will be glad when a story works, when an author succeeds. Analysis travels backwards, she says, but the writer works into the open. Miss Welty is concerned throughout this book with fiction, with fictions, and with how the process of writing turns truth into a novel or story. The Eye of the Story is a challenging title.
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