NAME AND ADDRESS

T. S. Matthews' autobiography is a leisurely, percipient, and progressively critical perspective- whether he is writing about his childhood or schooling, or about some thirty odd years in American journalism. His earliest memories, of an authoritarian clergyman father, an anxious, somewhat apologetic mother, move on from the nursery to the four schools attended (notably St. Paul's) and two universities, Princeton and Oxford. There is little of Julie, with whom he fell in love at 16, almost nothing of their marriage which ended tragically with her death, or their four children. But there is a great deal about his work, as a journalist, first on the New Republic (Edmund Wilson figures largely in these pages) and then on Time, where he worked his way up from the back of the book to managing editor. No Time-writer he, his polite pummelling of much of the brashness and brummagem of the early Time also includes a sense of personal default, and the dis-affection increases until the Time-Luce political use of journalism in the 1952 election led to his resignation. This last section, which deals with Luce and Ingersoll and a number of writers and editors has some fascinating shoptalk which never descends to the level of gossip but rather confirms the idealism and integrity of the man. Of certain interest in magazine circles, and an always interesting account.