Word: bret
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Sombre mahogany panelled walls, dark red plush hangings, massive carved doors, yellow tapers flickering before two bronze urns set in niches of the wall--the sitting room of the Van Bret mansion of Fifth Avenue in 1910; in this atmosphere, and as an integral part of it, appears Victoria Van Bret; guardian of the Van Bret millions, tyrant of the Van Bret household. Around the commanding presence and warped soul of this queenly spinster revolves a tense drama of hate and fear, swelling in an unvarying crescendo of emotional strain to a brilliant climax in the last scene. "Double Door...
...domestic supply has been fortified by English importations. But no longer can oldsters shake their heads over the departed glories of Edgar Allan Poe. In Dashiell Hammett the U. S. has again a first-rate writer of crime stories, as indigenous to his country and his day as Bret Harte was to his. This week Hammett fans are racing each other to the bookstores to get his latest, The Thin...
...this new world to be interpreted in literature, and who was to do it? One by one the post-war men of letters are held up for scrutiny and found wanting. Each failed to realize the task before him, or realizing it, fled from it. The sectionalists, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Eggleston and Cable, did not comprehend the whole. The fugitives, Sarah, Orne Jewett, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, sought sanctuary in trifling worlds of their own. William Dean Howells sounded the right note, but was too limited in experience and ability to be successful. The genteel writers of the nineties...
Double Door (by Elizabeth McFadden; Potter & Haight, producers). Victoria Van Bret (Mary Morris, malevolent Abbie in Desire Under the Elms}, a tyrannous New York aristocrat of the celluloid collar era, dominates her half-brother Rip and her younger sister Caroline with an insane despotism. When Anne Darrow (Aleta Freel of Both Your Houses}, Rip's nurse during an attack of pneumonia, is about to marry the Van Bret scion, Victoria forbids organ music, refuses to attend ' the ceremony, locks up the wedding presents and denies the bride the Van Bret pearls which are by will...
...Local Color: Bret Harte and Sarah Jewett," Professor Matthiessen, Harvard...