The Return, by Herbert Mitgang (Avon, 1973).
That I have enough still-unposted images of Robert McGinnis covers to fill out a birthday tribute series is largely down to two sources: Today’s Inspiration, a members-only Facebook page devoted to “classic illustration, animation, cartoon, and comic art from the mid-20th century”; and South Carolina resident Tim Hewitt, a former tech writer and “web monkey” turned ardent paperback collector, who has assisted me with several Killer Covers projects (such as this one). Tim was responsible for introducing me to today’s paperback front.
Herbert Mitgang was born on Manhattan Island, in New York City, back in 1920, earned a law degree from St. John’s College in Brooklyn (now St. John’s University), edited the military newspaper Stars and Stripes during World War II, and then spent 47 years at The New York Times, where he supervised the Sunday drama section (today’s Arts & Leisure), helped create the Op-Ed page in 1970, and served a lengthy stint as a book critic. (I used to relish his witty reviews.) Oh, and in 1956 Mitgang took up writing his own books, eventually penning 15 of them, including biographies of Abraham Lincoln, a retrospective on the 1930s confrontation between New York Mayor Jimmy Walker and then-governor of New York Franklin D. Roosevelt, and what the Times called “an exposé of the F.B.I.’s bulging files on America’s most renowned writers—John Steinbeck’s dossier was 800 pages long …”
The Return was the first among a handful of novels to his credit. Initially published by Simon & Schuster in 1959, its story builds around an American ex-GI who returns to Sicily after the war, searching for both strategic materials on his company’s behalf and for a young Italian woman he’d known and loved there. A contemporary Times critique called it “a sound and serious novel,” adding that Mitgang “displays a sure understanding
of the Sicily he knew as a soldier in the Mediterranean theatre and of the profound post-war currents that have rent the ancient fabric of its traditions.”(Left) The original, 1959 edition.
Mitgang was a lion in Gotham journalism circles. Beyond his career at the Times, he was assistant to the president and executive editor of CBS News, a visiting professor at Yale University, and an executive board member of the New York Newspaper Guild. He did time as president of both the Authors League Fund and the Authors Guild, and even scripted two one-man plays. After his demise in 2013 at age 93, the Times lauded him in a fashion every journalist might wish to be recalled, as “a perceptive reporter and deft stylist.”
Robert McGinnis was better recognized for creating sexy paperback covers, or ominous ones, but he was no slouch, either, when the assignment called for a romantic floral profusion. I’ll probably never own a copy of Avon’s issue of The Return, but after the many times I’ve studied it, it has become one of my favorites from his portfolio.
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