Monday, September 02, 2013

Fortnightly Book, September 1

Mackenzie Hooks Hyman served as a photo navigator in the Air Force (then part of the U. S. Army) in World War II; later, finding it difficult to support a wife and three children, he re-enlisted. It's not surprising that his major work, No Time for Sergeants, is a comedic look at the United States Army Air Force. Hyman took seven years to write it; he seems to have been a very careful writer. By the time of his death at age 39 in 1963, nine years after the publication of No Time for Sergeants, he had only this one novel and three short stories to his name, and was working on his second novel. This article from the Cordele Dispatch -- Hyman's hometown paper -- discusses some of the links and differences between the two novels.

Thus, Mac Hyman's No Time for Sergeants is the next fortnightly book. It was popular; a movie (starring Andy Griffith), a Broadway play, a teleplay, and a television series were based on it. Most of what little military-themed fiction I have comes from my grandfather; but this book, interestingly, is quite certainly my grandmother's, since it has a Leftwich bookplate, meaning, unless I'm mistaken (which I might well be, given how long it's been since I looked at that side of the family tree), that it belonged originally to my grandmother's aunt (on her mother's side).

A famous clip from the movie: