SOURCE: "Perelman on the Loose Again," in The New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1949, p. 27.

In the following review of Listen to the Mocking Bird, Gilroy describes Perelman the critic, the world traveler, and the satirist.

Here is a fine, light book, too light to break the nose of a dozing reader, which unquestionably enriches the recumbent culture season. The subject is the personality of Perelman, split in this collection of pieces from The New Yorker into three parts. There is Perelman, the book critic who deals exclusively in novels of the grand passion after they have ripened to a state of deliquescence; the world traveler who never fails at each stop to get into more trouble than the Swiss Family Robinson, and the reincarnation of Molière turned loose on chain drug stores and other American phenomena.

For the first of these roles it appears that Perelman...