Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hide-&-Seek. Serving up his own bold "antidote to long-entrenched clichés" about Victorian monstrosity, Author Maass says that the American architecture of the period was "distinguished by its pleasurable fancy and exuberant color." Some of the public buildings, e.g., Philadelphia's City Hall, were not in good taste, "but they had something more important-CHARACTER." As for the houses, they provided more comfort, light and air, and certainly had more vigor and imagination than the thin, nakedly simple, conformist boxes of today. "The broken 'picturesque' exterior made the most of the effect of sunlight...
With anything less than the Messrs. Ritchard and Mayehoff, all this would be no better show business than it is playwriting. But Mayehoff has no equal at harrumphing or at jerking his head, at skinning a cliché or stuffing a shirt or making very little sound like even less. And no one has quite the lost-in-a-balloon aplomb or the Mad-King-of-Bavaria hauteur of Cyril Ritchard. At the same time no one knows more surefire tricks. Ritchard will do as many absurd and outrageous things to keep an audience amused as a desperate father will...
...clich...
...events and characters of most historical novels about the U.S. West are interchangeable parts that have worn smooth with use. But in 1947 Montana's Alfred Bertram ("Bud") Guthrie Jr. took the opening of the West away from the cliché specialists with The Big Sky, a knowing, realistic book about the early traders, trappers and scouts that was as unashamedly rich in poetic evocation as it was in gritty plain talk. In 1949 came The Way West, a sober but richly authentic account of the great migration by wagon to the Pacific coast. Guthrie's new book...
Unfortunately, A House on the Rhine is termite-ridden with bygone clichés ("Don't bring her into this vile business. She's made of other clay"). But Author Faviell's dramatic documentation of the lawless legacy of the war and "the clash of old and new values in the mind of young Germany has the authority of her seven years of on-the-spot observation as the wife of a British official. Read simply as social prophecy, this novel disturbs with the suggestion that the seeds of a whole generation may already have been planted...