20–5772
A story of the Kentucky mountains spanning the years between the feud-ridden period of the late nineteenth century and the world war. One of Boone Wellver’s kinsmen is convicted for the murder of Goebel, the democratic nominee for governor, and young Boone swears vengeance to the death on the man whose false testimony convicted him. But Boone has already come under the influence of Victor McCalloway, a professional soldier, and McCalloway persuades him to wait till he is twenty-one. Boone is sent to school, falls in love with Anne Masters, learns a new code of manners and morals, but once comes dangerously near a return to his old gods and to keeping his old vow. He goes into politics and when the war comes enlists. He meets Anne, from whom he had been separated, and there is promise of happiness after the war.
Booklist 16:311 Je ’20
“It is a compliment to Mr Buck’s literary skill that he makes mighty interesting reading of the story of his hero’s symbolical struggle. ‘The tempering’ will not suffer by comparison with any of John Fox’s novels of similar locale.”
+ N Y Times 25:28 Jl 18 ’20 550w
BUCK, HOWARD SWAZEY. Tempering. *$1 Yale univ. press 811
20–1675
This is the first volume in the Yale series of younger poets. This series “is designed to afford a publishing medium for the work of young men and women who have not yet secured a wide public recognition. It will include only such verse as seems to give the fairest promise for the future of American poetry.” Twelve of the war poems printed as part two were in 1918 awarded the annual prize in poetry offered at Yale university. Other poems are reprinted from the Nation, Contemporary Verse, Poetry Journal, Poetry, the Masses, and the Yale Literary Magazine.