Word: authority
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...seduction ought to sell at least a couple of thousand copies. The preliminary scenes are as satirical as they are authoritative; whether they amuse or disgust depends on the reader. But if the reader is amused by the last half of the story, it is no fault of Author lies. From a silly romantic, Mrs. Pawle changes to a sinister slut, experimenting shamelessly with Alan's emotions, goading him to a peak of frenzy in which he attempts to commit murder. He is let off with awful humiliation in her husband's diabolical revenge...
...nearly 400 pages about these embattled primitives, Author Cheney never once skids into histrionics, bitterness or those tones of romantic compassion which mar the larger talent of Steinbeck. He presents these types of inarticulate and stony heroism not as sentimental literary properties but as if they had a dignified, unobstreperous standing in human existence. With a constant and expert attentiveness to exactitudes of speech, gesture, action, he writes of violence (a negress cutting a white man's throat), horror (a father incapable of restraining his vomit over the 19-day corpse of his son), brutality...
MISS SUSIE SLAGLE'S - Augusta Tucker - Harper ($2.50). A first novel of life among medical students at Johns Hopkins, 1912-1916, written with honest knowledge of the place and a brand of sentiment exactly suggestive of the time. Typical of Author Tucker's reverent gusto: a scene in which a young student at an autopsy is struck by the glowing beauty of lungs and intestines...
KITTY FOYLE - Christopher Morley -Lippincott ($2.50). Author Morley's 46th book is apparently a reaction against his cloying reputation for whimsy. Heroine is the kind of a girl things happen to, a wisecracking blurter who has an abortive affair with a Philadelphia socialite. At once too sophisticated and too crude, too literary and too "natural," her confessions are a departure from the old Morley Mellowness into a sort of Muley Naturalism...
...John Selby - Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50). A picturesque, sentimental, occasionally tedious first novel which won the $1,000 prize money as U. S. entry in a cosmic contest called the All-Nations Prize Novel Competition ($15,000). The author, 39, is a syndicate book reviewer for the Associated Press. The hero is a fat, rugged-individualist newspaper publisher, the background obviously Kansas City...