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Word: caine (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
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Usage:

...MOTH (373 pp.)-James M. Cain -Knopf...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Shocking Rover Boy | 7/26/1948 | See Source »

...Moth, Hollywood's hoary old sensation-monger James M. Cain tells the story of a nice boy-nice, that is, by comparison with other guys he has written about. Mr. Cain's new hero has a sense of beauty and even a sense of guilt. His missteps, including fraud, adultery, a few burglaries and one stickup, are practically forced upon him by the Great Depression. Thus Mr. Cain has it both-ways: his boy can be a college-educated, clean-cut young American and at the same time do the tough things in the tough situations that...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Shocking Rover Boy | 7/26/1948 | See Source »

Hero Jack Dillon-like Author Cain a Baltimore Irishman-tells the story in the first person, a common practice in Cain's novels, which absolves the author from having to write in English. Cain's command of the I'm-telling-you-brother vernacular has been compared with Lardner and Hemingway, but it is neither as inventive as Lardner's nor as selective as Hemingway's. It often sounds like what it often is-something the movies picked up pure and handed back to Americans as if it had been their...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Shocking Rover Boy | 7/26/1948 | See Source »

Manhood Regained. Instead of smelling out his mates and attacking them with bites, as Mr. Cain's earlier heroes did, Jack never once smells a girl; he responds to visual appeal. It is, in fact, at the point that he does not respond to it-when he has been riding the rails as a hobo for some months and a Petty girl strips and wiggles for him in a passing compartment -that he realizes he will have to do something (i.e., steal) to regain his manhood. The emotional crisis is at length resolved by an oilman's wife...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Shocking Rover Boy | 7/26/1948 | See Source »

There have usually been hidden wells of sentiment in Mr. Cain's characters. Even in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Frank, though handy enough at murder with a wrench, sometimes thought about God while in swimming. The Moth gets its title from the fluttering blue-green Luna moth that Jack Dillon falls in love with as a little boy and ever after remembers at beautiful moments...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Shocking Rover Boy | 7/26/1948 | See Source »

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