THE LINES ARE DRAWN

This survey of the cartoon winners of the Pulitzer Prize does more to bear witness to the indestructability of one of America's great journalists than it does to the perspicacity of the Pulitzer juries in their selections. Johnson gives due credit to the contribution the winners have made:- significant figures in the journalistic scene, almost without exception men whose cartoons have high-spotted with sincerity, acumen and wit the weaknesses in our national armor. But Johnson feels that the selections do not represent them at their best, with a few exceptions. He manages, in his text however, to show how these cartoonists have in their overall work contributed mightily, and through them he envisions the passing scene, in politics, in diplomacy, in war, in the facts behind the fiction, in labor and capital and industry and society. Much of which he writes is ancient history to some- but history repeating itself. The text is social commentary and the old bite is there; it is biography- and the men of whom he writes take on stature; it is a history of our times- in terms of his title.