Good Legwork, Bad Writing

Wayward Reporter: The Life of A. J. Liebling By Raymond Sokolov Harper & Row, 354 pp., $16.95

On the whole, the best thing about Wayward Reporter, Raymond Sokolov’s biography of A. J. Liebling, is the publicity it has brought to bear on Liebling himself. Prior to the appearance of Sokolov’s book, Liebling had slipped almost completely into obscurity, his writings out of print, remembered principally (if at all) as one of the assorted literary grotesques portrayed in Brendan Gill’s Here at the New Yorker. Now Liebling is back in the bookstores again, represented by both Wayward Reporter and two newly issued volumes of his own: Playboy’s omnibus collection, Liebling Abroad, and Pantheon’s hefty anthology, The Press. In the book business, at any rate, post hoc, ergo propter hoc is no fallacy.