Word: artlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...much to release American fiction from the cocoon of euphemism and sentimentality. Technically, he was an Impressionist. Like Flaubert, Chekhov and James, he aimed for "the immediate sense of life, not the removed report." He himself never achieved that summit of craft where art appears to be artless. His oddly arresting similes and metaphors jut up like boulders deflecting the clear stream of his narratives. Many a sentence of Crane's is beaded with the sweat that went into its construction. Despite these deficiencies, his pages twang with an intense, nervous conviction of actuality...
...result was a deceptively artless poetry of common speech. But behind the apparent artlessness was a cracker-barrel Socrates with a sense of humor-a pawky humor that was partly serious when it seemed most irreverent, gently mocking when it seemed most grave...