Word: authored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...more property, the heartbreaking description of the raw deal that led ignorant Mink Snopes to murder a rich landholder, the devastating characterization of Huey Long-like Politician Clarence Snopes, who rises from rural bully to candidate for Congress. If the Snopes family is unforgettable, it is because Author Faulkner understands them as deeply as he hates them. And like so many hates, it seems like a first cousin to love. As always, the Faulkner writing has its quota of awkwardness, irritation, downright sloppiness. And just as surely, much of it seems in the end like some kind of smoldering, personal...
...early success, Novelist Norman Mailer, 36, is fond of discussing his talent, often in terms that make it sound like a prize begonia. "America is a cruel soil for talent," he writes. "It stunts it, blights it, uproots it, or overheats it with cheap fertilizer." In this book, Author Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) sets aside the arduous business of novel writing and takes up horticulture. His first book in four years is a rock garden of schoolboy short stories, failed poems, fragments of plays, snippings from old novels and lumps from a new one-a mammoth work which...
...reacts with the fury of an upstaged diva to a photograph he considers ill-chosen. In effect, what Mailer has produced is a record of an artistic crackup. By the early 1950s the spare, controlled prose of The Naked and the Dead had turned sour and turgid, and its author was drifting in a haze of liquor, seconal and marijuana. Mailer has stopped using "the minor drugs," he says (although he believes that after a few more years of suppression marijuana will be as widely used as was bootleg gin in the '203), but his book gives no sure...
...author's Greenwich Village days, for instance, have left him with what seems to be a permanent fascination with Hip-that freemasonry of the beard and the weird, whose lodge brothers Mailer tags "white Negroes" (although black Negroes also are members). Hipsters, writes Mailer admiringly, are "philosophical psychopaths," stronger, less intellectual and more vigorous sexually than Beatniks. The opposite of Hip, of course, is Square. Mailer it-provides a small glossary of opposites: crooks and sin are Hip, while cops and salvation are Square; likewise T-formation football and the New York Herald Tribune are Hip, but the single...
...character was furnished by the "Chevalier incident," which played a substantial part in the Atomic Energy Commission's 1954 decision to lift Oppenheimer's security clearance. Now one of the principals in that incident has written a novel, and there is more than a hint from both author and publisher that the book will explain the Oppenheimer mystery. Because the Oppenheimer case, perhaps second only to the Hiss case, holds lingering drama and significance for Americans, even a fictional deposition is of major interest. But this turgid novel gives no answers; at best it offers further substance...