Word: devoto
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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MINORITY REPORT-Bernard DeVoto-Little, Brown...
...West after World War I came Critic Bernard DeVoto. He burst upon the literati of the effete East like The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang. At the top of his form Critic DeVoto suggested a geyser ejecting a column of live steam, accompanied by deep, sometimes rather incoherent rumblings, hisses, falling rocks, lava, fuliginous fumes. Readers of The Saturday Review of Literature began eagerly to await this weekly display. Later the same phenomenon could be observed in The Easy Chair, literary section of Harpers Magazine...
...exact causes of Bernard DeVoto's chronic exasperation eluded many people. Critic DeVoto claimed that it was his passion for straight thinking. Said he: "I have not objected to the use of abstractions but only to the use of abstractions in the illusion that they are bricks, girders, and tie bars. I have not objected to the use of theories but only to their use in ways that produce what are called higher truths. I have not objected to simplifications but only to the use of simplifications in order to satisfy the lust for oneness by denying facts, experience...
Doubtless there were other reasons. Critic DeVoto is possessed of a healthy combativeness. A professional Westerner (he was born in Utah), he takes a deep delight in curdling the blood of literary opponents with a Comanche yawp before rushing in for the kill. He is deeply, sincerely, authentically American: he always seems to be threatening to clinch a literary judgment in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. The literary situation which Critic DeVoto found in the East was calculated to exacerbate his deepest instincts, habits of thought and affection. With a loud roar of rage...
...Reader Smith is entitled to believe his grandfather Joseph Smith. Many others believe Brigham Young, who declared when Mormon polygamy was openly proclaimed at Salt Lake City that Joseph Smith had 27 secret wives besides Emma. Critic Bernard DeVoto (son of a Notre Dame mathematician, a Mormon mother) admitted that Joseph Smith had only five "official" children by his "official" wife Emma...