Word: authors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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That kind of news item, and such headlines as BILL CAREY'S PANTS FOUND AT SABUTTUS, sometimes makes the 1,500 Down-East readers of the Lisbon Falls (Me.) Enterprise suspect that their weekly is pulling their legs. But his tongue-in-cheek reporting, besides winning Editor-Author (Farmer Takes a Wife) John Gould, 38, a reputation as a Yankee humorist, has brought his weekly 1,000 "foreign" subscribers from other parts...
Hardworking Author Williams is said to have spent over four years writing House Divided, consulted 500 reference books and used up a quart of ink. Readers will find the result a brackish mixture of Northern blood and Southern guts, held in solution by a lively plot. House Divided lacks the nostalgia of MacKinlay Kantor's Long Remember, the flinty humor of Hervey Allen's Action at Aquila, the sexy folderol of Gone With the Wind. In sticking closer to the pedestrian facts of history, it is more convincing-if less exciting-than its predecessors...
Like most Civil War novels, it rustles with crinolines and chivalry, tells its story through the decline of an aristocratic family. But Author Williams' Currains are haunted by a unique skeleton in the plantation closet: it seems that Papa Currain, long since dead, "like a young torn turkey on the prowl, lightly dandling a hedge wench named Lucy Hanks in some hidden thicket ... had fathered Abraham Lincoln's mother...
...novel's revelation of this embarrassing patrimony, bequeathed along with the family silver and several hundred slaves, is the cream of Author Williams' jest. By the time he has skimmed it, Grant has taken Richmond, hunger has become the chief enemy and the Currains have scattered all over...
...fiction, House Divided is often contrived and melodramatic. As history, it is the war dimly seen through a haze of corruption, mismanagement, profiteering, draft-dodging, mint juleps and delusions of grandeur. Tedious as that is, readers can hardly fail to be impressed by the author's epic attempt to disinter the whole Confederacy. Says one character: "The Lord is on our side, but in consequence of pressing engagements elsewhere He could not attend at Fisher's Creek, Winchester, and Atlanta." If the Lord could not attend, history-grubbing Author Williams could, after a fashion...