DAVID WEY Tk SUEYDavin Ataan, author of The Hourglass, was born in the city of New York twenty-eight years ago, but he has seen a good deal of the country south of the Mason and Dixon Line. Before starting work on The Howr- glass he worked and traveled in the South for five years. In addition to his interest in legal cases similar to the one described in his novel, he has also been involved in social work and served as a Parole Officer, super- vising convicted felons, during 1945. Mr, Alman is married, has a young daughter, and tells us cha his interests also include anthropology and painting. PHOTOGRAPH BY COTTHEIL-FIELDLATE ON ELECTION NIGHT, on a quiet coun- try road in the South, three whitemen mect a lone Negro woman. Their drunken, brutal use of their opportunity sets in motion a sequence of events much more searching than its callously cruel beginning would indicate, One of the celebrants is a sixteen-year- old boy. He feels that he has only done what his fathers have done before him—a sporting naughtiness his elders will vouch for, The second man is the middle-aged, respected storekeeper of the little town, an illiterate but sensitive man, who the next morning begins co torture himself with fears about the consequences of what he would like to chink of as a little escapade. The third man is Brian Keller, a young lawyer, frustrated and unhappy in his stunted existence in this by-passed town and economy. Normally the incident would be quickly hwshed up and forgotten. The injured woman would not think of doing more than store up the mushrooming, bitter re- sentment in silence, Bur in this case new and strange elements are at work. The Negro woman and her husband do an un- thinkable thing. With help from both a Northern and a Southern committee to defend Negro rights, they go to court. None of this would have been more than exasperating to Brian except that he falls in love, Lottie is a town girl, but she has gone away to college and is not like the other girls Brian has known, She isn really pretty enough to capture a man on looks alone; in face, she seems almost uninter- ested in capturing a man at all. Lottie is filled with the determination not to be just a Southern Lady, but to face existence in her own right asa person. She can't really express it, nor can Brian understand icin words, but somehow she grows to mean to Brian all his questionings of his own be- havior, all his inarticulate dissatisfactions with himself, all his longings to escape the pattern. As the Negroes press their case and ten- sion rises to an expectably dangerous point in the town, the love between Brian and Lottie is strained to the breaking point. But in the climax of his struggle with himself and his world Brian does the one unpre- dictable ching. This is no cut-and-dried study of race relations, It is a thoughtful, incisive novel concerned with the entire social pattern of life in the South as Southerners themselves see it, $275