Word: belled
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Lisle Bell has probably reviewed more books than anyone in the world. Total is now around 17,000. But even among reviewers in Manhattan, where he has practiced his craft for 26 years, Bell is almost unknown. The reason: he specializes in the brief, unsigned booknote, turns them out at the rate of twelve a week...
...fellow craftsmen who know him consider him the most skilled practitioner of a most difficult kind of book reviewing. Critic Van Wyck Brooks, when he edited the Freeman, said that Lisle Bell had invented a new form, ranked him with highbrow Scottish Critic Edwin Muir. Poet Marianne Moore, who edited the Dial's brief booknotes for the ten years Bell contributed, called one cluster of his reviews the best thing she had seen. The reason why Reviewer Bell has never received recognition for his services to U.S. letters: his 17,000 reviews have been written as a sideline, while...
Christmas Package. The typical Lisle Bell review is a 200-or 300-word synthesis, usually of a light novel, with its plot outlined, setting and characters identified in one sentence, the author's distinctive quality set down accurately in unhackneyed terms in another, and the paragraph wound up as neatly as a Christmas package, with an amiable ironic phrase. His reviews are seldom malicious, very rarely given to unqualified praise. But only experts, looking back over Bell's collected works, can appreciate how outspoken he has been about many forgotten figures among literature's briefly great. Occasionally...
High-Power Condenser. Now 51, the son of a real-estate dealer who did not believe in education, Bell began publishing reviews as soon as he got out of high school. When he was a 19-year-old cub reporter on the Ohio State Journal at Columbus he wrote the paper's book reviews for nothing in his spare time...
Soon after Bell reached Manhattan, the late Clarence Britten hired him to write the Dial's brief reviews. That extraordinary literary journal carried pages of condensed reviews, most of which Bell wrote, and which for literary quality and precision of judgment ranked with the best writing in the magazine...