Word: balzac
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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World's Great Novels (Fri. 11:30p.m., NBC). First of four programs dramatizing Balzac's César Birotteau...
Their first assistant was Edgar Allan Poe; their first book review was J. G. Whittier's report (favorable) on Longfellow's Evangeline. Willis and Morris crammed down the throats of "the upper 10,000" the new works of De Quincey, Swinburne, Leigh Hunt, Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand and anyone else they could buy or steal...
...admirable The Tale of Beatrix Potter, the story of the eccentric lady who fashioned and illustrated the children's beloved Peter Rabbit. Charles Dickens, by Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, cast no light on Dickens' working manners, much on his bedside manner. Stefan Zweig's posthumous, unfinished Balzac might have said more if Zweig had lived to finish the telling. Hesketh Pearson's Oscar Wilde was a sober, intelligent study of a man-and type-who is rarely treated with either sobriety or intelligence. Three literary autobiographies rated notice: Communist Playwright Sean 0'Casey...
Even when his Chouans and La Peau de Chagrin made him an outstanding figure in French literature, he continued-like a married woman secretly visiting a maison de rendezvous to earn some pin-money-to frequent his former low haunts and degrade the famous Honoré de Balzac to the status of a cheap hack. . . ." In fact, Zweig does a better job of explaining the hack in Balzac than he does in explaining his greatness...
...Balzac's hunger for money and social status finally led him to marry one of his admiring correspondents, Madame Eve de Hanska, a wealthy noblewoman from the Ukraine. She gave him the position he had scrambled for all his life, but he died only five months after their marriage. Balzac's 17-year courtship was the most violent chapter in the fantastically turbulent novel that was his own life. Readers will wish that Stefan Zweig had kept himself alive long enough to have finished the proper telling...