Word: craftsmanship
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...popular professional, Booth Tarkington belonged, with his friend Harry Leon Wilson, and Joseph Hergesheimer and a few others, to a class whose flair and craftsmanship in the 'teens and '20s of this century is worth another look, though serious critics have generally ignored them. Their trade was to please the public for a living. But while they worked the mine of the U.S.'s more comfortable legends about itself, they worked it sometimes with real honesty and beauty. The literary data on life in the U.S. since 1900 would be as incomplete without Penrod and Alice Adams...
Another early hero of Surrealism, Salvador Dali, had been excommunicated for a rankling crime: success. Dali's slick-as-grease craftsmanship and even slicker pressagenting had won him a reputation as a sort of a screwball Benvenuto Cellini in modern dress. Last week a new edition of the real Cellini's famed Autobiography appeared (Doubleday Limited Editions; $10) and it was illustrated by Dali...
Born Yesterday is strictly a show, and one with more bounce than craftsmanship. The first act-with its picture of the home life of a baboon and his blonde-is delightful. After that, plot starts muscling in on character, and the show has its ups & downs. But things are kept moving by enough good gags and two topnotch performances. Radio Sports Announcer Paul Douglas makes a solid character-tough, vicious, yet somehow comic-of Harry Brock. Judy Holliday (Kiss Them for Me), with her flat voice, slow takes and floozie walk, is often wonderful as the blonde. When she sorts...
Both these novels prove that this is not true. Neither of them is a great work, but both are remarkable jobs of novel-writing craftsmanship. If Robert Wilder could report U.S. life as brilliantly as he probes the iridescent slime on top of it, Written on the Wind might have been more than neurally exciting. If Frances Parkinson Keyes (rhymes with eyes) could write a novel as well as she can organize one, The River Road might have been a relevant resuscitation instead of a 747-page monument to the past. If both novelists had been stirred by the vitality...
...graveyards first found their voice. It was written with deep compassion and the sad but tough-fibered cynicism with which compassion deflects the battering blows of the world. Arch of Triumph is no All Quiet on the Western Front. The compassion is still there; the cynicism has deepened. The craftsmanship is expert...