SOURCE: "Panoplied in Their Original Magic," in The New York Times Book Review, April 4, 1948, p. 5.

Below, Follett offers a laudatory review of The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard.

Casting a ballot for A. E. Coppard always seems the combination of a manifest duty with a really acute pleasure. I cast my own first one for Adam & Eve & Pinch Me in 1921, some months before that first disclosure of a new talent was published in America. The excitement of that discovery is still vivid. Of course that title-story is in [The Collected Tales]—as it must be in any selection of its author's tales, were the number but six instead of thirty-eight.

The thirty-eight, a winnowed selection (by Coppard himself) of volumes published from 1921 to 1944, proffer the not inferior excitement of rediscovery and corroboration. They read equally well if you start with the last story—"Fifty Pounds," one of...