Word: authors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WHEN A young writer publishes his first novel, there is a certain excitement, an anticipation that he may become one of the chroniclers of his generation. With the recent publication of Life in the Land of the Living, there is exactly that hope for its author, Daniel Vilmure, a 1987 graduate of Harvard College...
...year ago. Since then he has spent most of his time shuttling around Central America's capitals. Moody reported much of this week's main story, wrote the one-page description of life in war-weary El Salvador and conducted interviews with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, author of the peace plan and winner last month of the Nobel Peace Prize, and with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra. Said Moody: "Getting in to see the top people makes a major difference in a reporter's ability to understand a complicated story and to convey that understanding to readers...
This novel marks another step in one of the most interesting careers in contemporary letters. It has taken a while for that shoe to drop. The Middle Ground, British Author Margaret Drabble's ninth novel, appeared in 1980 and underscored a process that had begun several books earlier: a movement away from the narrow, intense psychological portraits of her early fiction (A Summer Bird-Cage, The Garrick Year) toward panoramas of realistic characters placed in a recognizable society. Drabble's progress was retrograde, running against the modern notion that fiction should be deep and singular rather than broad and general...
...author's tenth novel suggests that she was not stymied at all; she was merely waiting for current events to provide her with enough material for a new book. The Radiant Way is, among other things, a chronicle of some five years of British life under the sway of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and & the Tory party. Drabble's fictional characters must cope on a regular basis with a changing political landscape. They are spirited, intelligent, opinionated and hardly passive, but their destinies are not under their own control. Government budget cuts can render them redundant, cost them their jobs...
Into the Woods cannot change the situation by itself or even by example. For one thing, imitation is a less viable route to success in the theater than in prime-time TV. For another, only Sondheim is Sondheim. Says Composer- Lyricist Jerry Herman, author of La Cage aux Folles and Hello, Dolly: "We would all agree that Steve is the genius of the group, the one who keeps on taking the musical theater to new places." What Into the Woods does, gloriously, is make the case for what musicals might be, blending innovation and old-fashioned storytelling into an elixir...