Word: devoto
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Last term the Liberal Union devoted its energies to helping to arrange the test case o the banning of the book by canvassing. Various Cambridge booksellers. The trial sale of the book to Bernard DeVoto, the writer by the University Law Book Store was arranged by the Liberal Union with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union. The case is now pending in the Cambridge courts, awaiting hearing on an appeal...
...Literary Fallacy consists of five lectures given by DeVoto. Purportedly a re-examination of the literary '20s, most of it is given over to a vehement tirade, strident as a soapbox oration, against Van Wyck Brooks and his The Flowering of New England. What may have puzzled Indiana students, and is likely to puzzle readers who pay $2.50 to share their experience, is Mr. DeVoto's belligerence. With a chip on his shoulder the size of a two-by-four, with many a dubious assertion insisted on with the finality of the village atheist, and with sideswipes...
...Says DeVoto: the '20s is "one of the great periods of American literature, and probably the most colorful, vigorous, and exciting period. . . . There were more competent writers in America than there had ever been before. ... In the average they were the liveliest, the most vigorous, the most entertaining writers the United States has ever had. No one who lived and read his way through the Twenties will forget the verve, the excitement of that literature, the sheer animal spirits with which it treated even its most lugubrious themes...
Nevertheless Critic DeVoto then quotes with approval Van Wyck Brooks's diagnosis of what was wrong with much of that writing: "Writers have ceased to be voices of the people. . . . Preponderantly, our literature of the last quarter-century has been the expression of self-conscious intellectuals who do not even wish to be voices of the people. Some of these writers have labored for the people; they have fought valiant fights for social justice. But their perceptions have not been of the people. . . . The literary mind of our time is sick. It has lost its roots in the soil...
...DeVoto then launched one of the most bitter and unprovoked attacks in the history of U.S. literature...