Word: cronin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Cronin's novel, "The Stars Look Down." is a saga of simple working people. The English movie-version best film to enliven local screens in many a month-logically extends the implication of its subject-matter. From a timely oral prologue we learn that the Welsh coal-miners, whose lives are to be dug and coughed and hammered out before us, symbolize the guys-named-Joe "of every nationality and every calling, such as there are the whole world over...
...commenting on A. J. Cronin's The Keys of the Kingdom in TIME of July 21, you state: "Chief difficulty in writing about Christian goodness is that almost nobody believes it is possible. Next difficulty is that few people find it exciting." That is a remarkable assertion, even for TIME, and interesting if true. It can't well be argued without the protagonists' defining what they mean by Christian goodness and that seems to allow a wide interpretation. Let me suggest, however, that there are individuals who are naïve enough to associate Christian goodness with...
...Cronin usually writes his novels in three to five months, though their germination period may be five to ten years. But The Keys of the Kingdom has been in his mind since boyhood, took eight months to rewrite four times. He writes with a fountain pen and a driving will. Writing is a "grey monotony of hell" punctuated by occasional outbursts of frayed nerves, while Cronin's three sons ("all named after saints") wonder "if the world wouldn't be better off without authors." Mrs. Cronin, also a doctor, who has a phenomenal memory for names, places, dates...
Urge to write The Keys of the Kingdom came after Cronin's play, Jupiter Laughed, got laughed off Broadway. Says Cronin: "It was the best thing in the world for me." He felt he had to do a big job "to prove to his critics and himself that he wasn't going soft." He has no messianic complex. Like all Cronin novels, The Keys of the Kingdom was written "to lighten, not to enlighten the world...
...Catholic, Cronin hopes that the Catholic Church will like his book. "But if they turn their back upon it, it will be a condemnation of Catholicism in the best sense of that word-universal...