ALTHOUGH the local color school of American literature went out of style many years ago after a comparatively short, but exceedingly prolific career, occasional books written on particular sections of the United States by author who still remain ardent followers of the school occasionally do appear. According it Granville Hicks such writers were not a true part of America's Great Tradition, but nevertheless it cannot be denied that they contribute an extremely essential section to the composition of American Literature.

Walter D. Edmonds has long been one of these remaining local colorists, choosing as his particular field the Erie Canal section of New York State and the life of that district. His first attempt "Rome Haul" won him fame shortly after he graduated from Harvard. This latest book is a collection of short stories which he has been writing since undergraduate days on The Advocate. The stories, like all local color products are merely tales of anecdotes and legends of the life on the canal. And as is usual in works of this type, if you have read one or two of them you feel you have read them all.

Taking many of his cues from his predecessors in the field Mr. Edmonds does not blaze any remarkably new trail, and sometimes seems content merely, to retrace the stops of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. A story such as the "Death of Red, Peril," a tale of racing caterpillars, would indeed be famous, had Mark Twain never written his "Jumping Frog."

As the book stands, though, it is an enjoyable anthology of stories of the Canal and the people who plied is waters. It covers a particular field which heretofore has received little notice, and adds another chapter to the ever growing literature of America. One cannot help but have the feeling though, that the book really belongs back in the early seventies and eighties along with the rest of that school which did so much to acquaint America with herself. And yet one has the feeling that Granville Hicks was right: the school is one which has disappeared from our literature, and attempts to revive it somehow have not seemed to click. It is a thing of the nineteenth century; and those who try to bring back into reality the scenes and haunts of their youth which they have long yearned to immortalize, are doomed to disappoint a reading world which today seems interested in a different type of American literature.