Word: autumns
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...Autumn Garden (by Lillian Hellman; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden) is a strikingly new kind of Lillian Hellman play. The plot is not at all striking and is secondary to the people; the people are pretty average people, neither vipers nor vixens. The scene is the South-an elegant summer boarding house run by a wellborn, middle-aged spinster. The guests are largely people of her own generation and kind-fiberless, frustrated people: a quiet, cynical drinker who has never married; a quiet-seeking general married to a fool; a confused young man halfheartedly about to marry the spinster...
People, The Autumn Garden contends, are the products of all their past acts, so that for most of them the middle of the journey is equally the destination. The play's point-that lack of character is also fate-is driven sharply home. Its people,, though much alike in stature and background, are vividly drawn and brilliantly differentiated. Miss Hellman's portraits, without being unsympathetic, are adultly uncompromising...
...Miss Hellman's real emphasis is on separate frustrations and intimate crises, so that a Southern comedy of manners is always rubbing elbows with a Chekhovian study of character. And The Autumn Garden has the relaxed Chekhov method without his unifying lyrical mood-his sense that if people delude themselves, life is itself delusive. Actually Chekhov cuts deeper than Miss Hellman because, being a realist rather than a moralist, he very seldom grants his characters the ability to face the truth about themselves...
...best literary work of 1950, the U.S. book industry gave the second annual National Book Awards to William Faulkner for his Collected Stories; New-Ion Arvin for his biography, Herman Melville; and Poet Wallace Stevens for The Auroras of Autumn...
...Overshadowing all issues in autumn German elections...