Word: arounders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...reality. Best atmospheric touches: Peter's grubby home; the grey, frayed hopelessness of his hard-working parents (admirably played by Thelma Ritter and Luis Van Rooten); the dank, underground goings-on in the Dukes' basement club; the bits & pieces of broken-down humanity that cluster like flies around Selma's sidewalk soda stand. Especially good are the close-up studies of gratuitous violence: in the poolroom the Dukes brutally beat up a couple of outsiders; in the school manual training class the kids (armed with the crude guns they have been secretly making at their work benches...
Just when Lund thinks that his wife has begun to love him, the lily-like Lucrezia tries to do him in with a dollop of poisoned wine. Lund seems to enjoy all this nonsense, but he is the only member of the cast who does. Miss Goddard, trailing around in sumptuous gowns, waits in vain for an opportunity to climb alluringly in & out of a Renaissance...
...became no cattle-raising Texan; he became an artist. As such, on commission for LIFE, he landed on Peleliu in September 1944, with an assault wave of U.S. marines and lived through one of the bloodiest island battles of the Pacific war. Since his return he has been hanging around Mexican bull rings with a new ear for the heartbeats of men in danger...
...read his manuscripts (Roberts read them aloud to him when Tarkington's eyes went bad), made improvements and changes which Roberts accepted gratefully. "On some evenings he'd stop me at the end of almost every sentence, and we'd examine that sentence and push it around and rephrase it, clearing it up and sharpening it and smoothing it: adding a little to it ... [I] suggested that if he really thought the book had merit, he let me put his name on the title page with mine and take half the royalties...
Readers who plow through I Wanted to Write may wish that Tarkington had been around to discuss it with Roberts. He almost certainly would have cut out the ten-page list of people to whom Roberts wrote letters in 1935, together with the scores of pages of now-dull journeyman journalism reprinted here in full. He might even have suggested, as Roberts' publisher should have, that I Wanted to Write should be quietly put away in an old trunk...