Word: bennette
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ARNOLD BENNETT by MARGARET DRABBLE 396 pages. Knopf...
...Quotidian" was one of Arnold Bennett's favorite words. Dailiness was his mania. The best of his realistic novels about hard life in North Staffordshire are triumphant patchworks of detail about people who worked in the fields or the potteries, their habits, routes and involuntary timetables. In his own life, even when he was a millionaire Edwardian novelist with a yacht and country houses, he wrote as many as 5,000 words virtually every day. The total result is practically incalculable. Margaret Drabble lists 84 "major" works-mostly novels and plays-but beyond that there are diaries, frivolities, criticism...
...kindly, Bennett is not fashionable any more. The Old Wives' Tale, perhaps his best novel, is one of the few that are read at all. It is possible that he would accept this near obliteration. He was always insistent that he wrote for the day and did not understand colleagues who were employed by "posterity." Although he knew his full worth in terms of a publisher's contract, he was a modest, self-effacing man who never forgot his roots or upgraded his accent. He was born in 1867 in Burslem, one of the "Five Towns...
Once started, he swiftly became editor of a magazine called Women, turning out stories and articles on such subjects as "Do Rich Women Quarrel More Frequently than Poor?" as well as a column signed "Barbara." But one journal could not contain him; Bennett had realized that he could write anything. Within a few years it was a critical commonplace to grade his output: Prime Bennett (literature), Pure Bennett (for fiction lovers), and Just Bennett (for those who read anything...
...Pure Bennett and Just Bennett were often eager, free fantasies based on the luxuries he was increasingly able to buy. He loved yachts and grand hotels. Two of his greatest bestsellers, Grand Babylon Hotel and Imperial Palace, are phantasmagorias crowded with counts and chandeliers. To the connoisseur of popular fiction they are still texts; Arthur Hailey, for one, admits to studying them for his own whopper, Hotel...