Word: bromfield
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Smith, by Louis Bromfield. Author Bromfield borrows Sinclair Lewis' old gloves and goes to work on the bruised midsection of the U.S. middle class; a fairly brisk exhibition, even though a lot of the punches land soft (TIME...
Change from Jello. As a slash at American middle-class life, Mr. Smith rarely cuts more than cuticle-deep. But for Author Louis Bromfield, who has tackled only Jello-weight themes for years, it marks an abrupt change of mental pace. Dunked in soggy prose and soupy characters, Mr. Smith still claims a kissing kinship with Babbitt and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman...
...also contains many of the standard gibes of European intellectuals-no surprise, since Midwesterner Bromfield himself spent 15 expatriate years in France prior to 1938. The ideas behind Mr. Smith hatched after his return. "I was struck very forcefully," he says, "by things I might not have noticed if I had been living here all that time." Chief among them: "The confusion in the minds of many Americans about the importance of water closets, automobiles, radios, etc. They think they are civilized because they have these. But they actually are a means to an end, not an end itself...
Today, says Author Bromfield, the level of U.S. taste is "based on the sports pages, comics, radio and TV." Flocking together in crowds, many Americans "cannot be alone and think for themselves...
...Author Bromfield was not always so alert at spotting the termites in the American grain. Interviewed at a homecoming in 1933, he cried: "What do I like about America? Everything! ... We have a Pollyanna's Paradise ... I went to a movie, walked through the five-&-ten, ate peanuts and felt at home again...