Book of the Day: a 1930s American Revolution-era classic

Walter D. Edmonds, In the Hands of the Senecas (Atlantic Monthly / Little Brown, Boston, Massachusetts (1947). Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine/Very Good. Reprint. Duodecimo, 7 1/2" tall, 213 pages, gray boards. A near fine, clean, neat hard cover with light shelf wear; hinges and binding tight, paper cream white. In a good, moderately worn dust jacket with several significant edge tears. HBB price: $10.

First serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1937, this 1947 reprint is a nicely-done book club edition.

The author (1903-1998) was a well-regarded American young adult and adult fiction writer for seven decades. The New York Times wrote, when he died,

Mr. Edmonds was best known for his realistic representations of history as seen through the lives of ordinary fictional characters. He was concerned, as he once wrote, ''with life as it was; as you or I, our mothers or our wives, our brothers and husbands and uncles, might have experienced it.''

Half of his 34 books were for children. In 1942 he won a Newbery Medal for ''The Matchlock Gun,'' about a boy in Colonial New York who defends his home against invading Indians. In 1976, he won a National Book Award for ''Bert Breen's Barn,'' whose main character was based, Mr. Edmonds said, on the man who showed him how to tie his shoelaces ''so they never came undone, until you wanted them to.''

He was born on July 15, 1903, at his family's summer retreat outside Boonville, N.Y., near the Black River. In 1926 he graduated from Harvard College. Although his father, a patent lawyer, wanted him to become a chemical engineer, Mr. Edmonds found another path. He started publishing his fiction at Harvard and became the editor of The Advocate, Harvard's literary magazine.

In his fiction, as in his life, Mr. Edmonds was most at home in the Mohawk River Valley and the Black River Canal. He said his life belonged ''far more to the farm than with my own family.''

His first novel, ''Rome Haul,'' a book about the Erie Canal, was published in 1929 and was turned into a Broadway play, ''The Farmer Takes a Wife,'' by Marc Connelly and Frank Elser. Mr. Edmonds's best known work was ''Drums Along the Mohawk,'' a fictional tale of the settlers of the Mohawk Valley in Revolutionary times. The book, published in 1936, was a best seller for two years, taking a back seat only to ''Gone With the Wind.'' In 1939, it was made into a movie, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert.

''Chad Hanna,'' Mr. Edmonds's novel about the circus, published in 1940, was praised by R. L. Duffus in a book review in The New York Times for his ''painstaking accumulation of yesterday's commonplaces,'' and for catching ''the incidental things.'' It also became a movie, with Dorothy Lamour, Linda Darnell and Henry Fonda.

Mr. Edmonds published many of his stories in The Atlantic Monthly, Dial, McCall's, The Saturday Evening Post, The Forum and Scribner's before they came out as books. His last book, ''Tales My Father Never Told,'' was published in 1995.

On at least two occasions in his life, Mr. Edmonds stepped out of his role as a fiction writer. In 1942, during a luncheon for Children's Book Week, he told of the Nazi atrocities and attacked what he called the ''German bedtime story,'' the myth that the Germans are ''nice, kind people, people who love children.'' He said that the Germans ''are guilty as hell.'' In 1944, Mr. Edmonds invited Willi Schumacher, an escaped German prisoner of war, to breakfast at his home and then turned him in to the F.B.I.

Mr. Edmonds's ''history is partly fiction and his fiction is partly history,'' Mr. Duffus wrote in a 1936 review of ''Drums Along the Mohawk'' in The Times. For that reason, Mr. Edmonds often found himself explaining that his novels were historical, though not history. ''To those who may feel that here is a great to-do about a bygone life, I have one last word to say. It does not seem to me a bygone life at all.''