Word: books
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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English youngsters still burst their Eton jackets giggling at Lear's Book of Nonsense. The U. S. breed find Lear's nonsense nonsensical. But Lear is essentially grownups' Mother Goose. Limericks like the Young Girl of Majorca still wow big-wigged British judges...
...months rumors of a Japanese All Quiet on the Western Front have trickled into the U. S. The book's author, so rumor ran, was a Japanese corporal serving in China, but the book was antiwar, its sales large* (500,000 copies in Japan). Last week U. S. readers could see for themselves "Corporal Ashihei Hino's" gun-sight ac count of the Japanese invasion of China...
...limerick lovers the name Edward Lear has long (and incorrectly) meant the inventor of the limerick. To painters it has meant a third-rate landscapist of the second-rate British school. But when grandfather was a little boy, Edward Lear meant a big fat Book of Nonsense with a gilt cat bowing a bull fiddle on the cover. Inside were such "queery Leary" drawings and poems as the Owl and the Pussy-Cat,† The Moppsikon Floppsikon Bear, The Dong with the Luminous Nose. Last week Author Angus Davidson took this nonsensical Englishman seriously enough to publish his first biography...
...youngest son in a family of 21 children, shy, shrinking, nearsighted, epileptic Edward Lear was coddled by a sister 21 years older, who never let him attend school. As a young man his painstakingly realistic illustrations of a book on parrots got him a job sketching the private menagerie of the Earl of Derby. His first meals were taken with the Earl's steward, but Lear's charm and humor soon won him a chair in the dining room...
John Herrmann was a traveling salesman himself at 15, studied law, took up journalism before he married Josephine Herbst (Nothing Is Sacred, Money for Love), published a book, What Happens, in Paris in 1926. In 1932 he shared with Thomas Wolfe a $5,000 prize in a Scribner's short-novel contest. Herrmann's work, Big Little Trip, was about a jewelry salesman who oversold his customers. The Salesman suggests that its author is oversold on salesmen...