+ − El School J 21:152 O ’20 500w + Springf’d Republican p11a S 26 ’20 160w
STREET, JULIAN LEONARD. Sunbeams, Inc. il *$1.25 Doubleday
20–16499
Henry Bell Brown is introduced to us first as he is leaving the staff of the New York Evening Dispatch, and is given a farewell banquet. He is leaving to join a firm of “advertising engineers,” and subsequently becomes H. Bell Brown. It is only when he goes into business for himself that he rises to the glory of “Belwyn Brown.” It is his big idea of “merchandising” (one of his favorite verbs) sunshine that brings him success. He becomes a sort of a commercial Pollyanna spreading Gloomer Chasers broadcast on boiler-plate pages—something on this order: “No business is busted when there’s a smile left in the bank.” The war threatens the business of Sunbeams, Inc., but he enlarges its scope, goes to France and helps “win the war with sunshine.” Upon his return he is more convinced than ever that his name and fame shall be a household word and spares no effort to accomplish this result. At the end of a successful banquet given in his honor by the Pundits he is able to “indulge himself in a brief self-gratulatory yet philosophical reflection. ‘One thing is sure,’ he said to himself; ‘In this world a fellow gets just about what’s coming to him.’”
“Not only is the story so thin that it will hardly hold together, but it is impossible to feel any sympathy with the leading character—a state of things which often is fatal in a work of this kind. That it is not so in this instance is immeasurably to the credit of the author. It affords whimsical entertainment of unique quality.”
+ − N Y Times p22 S 19 ’20 350w
Reviewed by E. L. Pearson
+ Review 3:269 S 29 ’20 200w
“Short story with a lot of humor and various amusing exhibitions of psychology.”