Word: baileys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Broadway & Old Bailey. Few British authors since the days of Charles Dickens and his disciple George Gissing have tried to do for London what numerous U.S. writers have done for New York. As a result, Dulcimer Street is likely to be an eye opener for U.S. readers. Apart from the crime he commits, Author Collins' Percy Boon is a typical young Londoner of 1939-as dedicated to intricate machinery and peroxide beauty as Americans are supposed to be. Percy's natural habitats are not the fast-disappearing pubs and winding streets of old London, but new London...
...LYDIA BAILEY (488 pp.) - Kenneth Roberts-Doubleday...
Poor thing, they said, she died only last year, young and far from home, carried off by the yellow fever in French Haiti. Lydia Bailey, late of Philadelphia, looked as pure and demure in her portrait (by Gilbert Stuart, of course) as only a heroine in a historical novel can look. Handsome young Albion Hamlin stared at the portrait, shivered, felt "something intimate and personal" catch at his throat. The time: 1800-05. The range: post-Revolutionary U.S., the troubled Haiti of Toussaint L'Ouverture, North Africa at the time of the Barbary Wars...
Irascible, fact-conscious Kenneth Roberts, a heckler of historians and probably the most widely admired of U.S. historical novelists, is said to have spent six years on Lydia Bailey, grubbing details from archives, translating French sources, writing and polishing the text. Even so, Lydia is a pretty light-weight performance. But the first printing (including Literary Guild) is rumored to be 1,000,000 copies. Hollywood's 20th Century-Fox has already bought the story for $215,000. As a narrative it lacks the fire and dramatic punch of Northwest Passage, the unity and cogency of Oliver Wiswell...
...Dessalines. Lydia's standout character: King Dick, giant, uninhibited Sudanese ex-slave who figured in Author Roberts' The Lively Lady and who swaggers happily around Haiti with pearls as big as birds' eggs, a harem of doting wives and a 5-ft. bamboo shillelagh. Lydia Bailey is the stuff that sells, but doesn't survive...