Word: details
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Palms in Paris. No previous biographer has detailed the nagging poverty of the Emerson family as closely as Author Rusk -the boarders in the house, and the gifts of money that arrived at the last moment. Other biographers have told the story of Emerson's teaching after his graduation from Harvard; Biographer Rusk gives the subjects he assigned to his girl students for English composition, his comments on their papers. Other biographers have touched lightly on the tragedies in Emerson's family; Rusk tells in detail of his brother Bulkeley, who lived past middle age without developing mentally...
Emerson. They have presented the essential facts of Emerson's life, and a good deal of colorful detail, upon which critics and biographers have speculated ever since. Some of the resulting literary studies, of which the work of Van Wyck Brooks is the masterpiece, are among the most engaging criticism in English...
When Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor took over the National Geographic in 1899, he likes to recall, the circulation was so small (900) that "I could carry the entire issue on my back." Today, says Grosvenor, who shares his magazine's passionate addiction to detail, "A single issue would form a pile more than eight miles high, or 79 piles each as tall as the Washington Monument." In its familiar yellow-bordered, acorn-decorated wrapper, this month's issue reached 2,150,000 living rooms, libraries, throne rooms and dentists' offices from Maine to Monaco...
Unfortunately, nothing else in The Lottery is as good. The other 24 pieces are brightly lacquered sketches trimmed to New Yorker specifications-deadpan, passionless portraits of cruel children, quietly miserable spinsters, clumsy middle-class drifters, city people lonely in the country. Shirley Jackson accumulates little piles of irrelevant detail, topples them over with the expected sardonic swipe. If she could break out of this mold, she might become one of the U.S.'s best short-story writers...
Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra (the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Eduard van Beinum conducting; English Decca, 10 sides). Fritz Reiner's performance of this great work for Columbia (TIME, Jan. 3) may hold the edge in fire and power; but the fine work of the Concertgebouw, and the spaciousness and detail of Decca's recording, make this...