Word: boyhoods
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Several minor characters give excellent performances. Robert Blackburn as Mickey, a prize fighter who loved and left Ella, is marvelously cocky, and provides most of the few light moments of the evening. Jim Spruill, as a boyhood friend of Jim, is successful in conveying the differences between the races--the joviality of the Negroes, the awkardness of the whites--O'Neill seeks to establish in the first two scenes. Bradley Marable as Jim's mother is also excellent, delivering the line "Dey ain't many strong. Dey ain't many happy neider" with moving compassion...
Nelson Algren's Boyhood...
...true that he worked his way through the University of Illinois, but generally Swede and I had a pretty carefree time in our teens. The point is, the Nelson Algren I grew up with had an ordinary boyhood without hunger, fear or deprivation. He's a great writer without the hoked-up background...
Boring's interest in psychology followed a general boyhood interest in science. He lived with a family of many relatives over his great-grandfather's drug store in Philadelphia. "There were lots of us in those three floors. I learned to read at home, since I went to school quite late. And I had very few friends my age; I played alone...
...best thing in the book is naturally about Chicago - and about his own boyhood, when "somebody was always excommunicating" him. It is essentially about the tough streets where he once sold papers, and the bitter time when a child discovers the ironies involved in the goodness of God and the cruelty of man. But Algren spoils it from evident fear of falling into false sentimentality. He falls right into another kind of falsity. Says the boy Algren: "I want to see the face of Gawd." Facetious spelling gets the adult Algren off no theological or esthetic hook and simply suggests...