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4. It looked like the old vaudeville stunt.

   I was particularly interested in the account of the East St. Louis visits in your own book.  I saw a good deal of that district at one time.  Adah Isaacs Mencken is always fascinating, isn't she?   I never had a professor yet that did not lecture on the gal with zest.
   Social writers I have found in general to be fascinatingly contradictory.   There was Algren, of course (Let's omit him.) But Mosley according to O'Leary did not like his own race.  He preferred the company of white people always.  And even with them he was pretty tough.  The Chicago section of Wrights' work (did you read the chapter in [[underlined:  Mademoiselle?) is approaching a regular debacle of self-pity.  He takes everything that happens to him with such utter seriousness.  I wish he had more of a sense of humor because the difficulty that is looming up crossed out: with him is that many white people too undergo the humiliations in the north that he describes.   And some of the insults he records one can see so easily go back to the general