Word: blurbs
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Author Hutchinson has stirred away so bravely that Elephant and Castle, his character-caravan of London between the wars, is currently being compared by blurb artists to the novels of Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray. He has cooked so many people into his plot (over 100 in all) that he has had to include an explanatory list of them. His dialogues range from the chirpings of Armorel's ultra-refined relations ("Cousin Freddie, don't you think it's awful for Mums, seeing the last little chick fluttering away from the nest?") to the Anglo-Genoese babblings...
Last week the New York Times's amiable Brooks Atkinson turned the other cheek. He paid to put a two-line blurb from his own review into the play's small daily ad in the Times. Before accepting it, the paper's finicky advertising department checked with Anderson, who said, "Why sure, if he wants to pay for it." Next day the Playwrights' Company happily announced: "Atkinson has initiated a welcome trend . . . [We] will welcome similar advertising contributions...
Beauteous Kay Summersby, the onetime Mayfair dress model and WAC captain who drove Ike Eisenhower's staff car, had finished a book called Eisenhower Was My Boss. An excerpt from Kay's preface was used in a long blurb for the syndicated newspaper rights: "It is, in a way, a report to women, other women ... I was to work and eat and ride and laugh and drink and play and suffer with the famous commander ... I was to know love, intimately. And I was to know, just as intimately, the unspeakable pain of losing my lover in battle...
Next week Hogarth House will publish (at $2.95) The Sexual Conduct of Men and Women, by Norman Lockridge (author of Bachelors' Quarters and editor of The Golden Treasury of the World's Wit and Wisdom). Says a dust-jacket blurb: "We did not plan to publish the contents of this book for some time to come . . . [but] excitement caused by the recent appearance of the Kinsey Report has suddenly brought most of these doubtful factors into a maturity of public interest. . ." Sample spicy headings in Lockridge's work: "What a Man Expects of a Mistress," "Good Women...
...fooled us again, "The Stoic" will take its place in American literature courses as his last novel. The course reading list will be the proper place for it, since--like Dreiser's other posthumous novel "The Bulwark"-- "The Stoic's" chief importance is historical rather than literary. The jacket blurb to the contrary, "The Stoic" simply does not reach the stature of "The Financier" or "The Titan," its predecessors in "The Trilogy of Desire." In concluding what Parrington called "a colossal study of the American businessman," Dreiser tells those familiar with the earlier volumes little they do not already know...