Word: devoto
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...YEAR OF DECISION: 1846-Bernard DeVoto-Little, Brown...
...Naval Observatory saw the "ominous and inconceivable" happen-Biela's comet split in two. This lucky break permitted history to crowd into the balance of that amazing year a series .of events (of which the Mexican War and the westward migration are best known) that cause Historian Bernard DeVoto to believe that 1846 was the great divide in U.S. history. He has written this book to prove...
...Quilting. The world of gossip of 75 years ago, that lies silent, stitched into quilt by hands that long ago lost their taper & silkiness & eyes & face their beauty, & all gone down to dust & silence; & to indifference to all gossip." Says Bernard DeVoto: "We could have used those scenes, if Mark had found a way of using them...
Bustle-Ridden Rabelais. The myth of Mark Twain as a frustrated, bustle-ridden Rabelais (see Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain) is nearly dead. DeVoto has done more than any other critic to kill that petticoat ghost, but in this book, with fresh evidence at hand, he gives it another kicking around. The author of the ribald 1601-itself a symptom of inhibition-needed neither his staid friend William Dean Howells nor his gentle wife Olivia to wash out his mouth with soap. Mark Twain, says DeVoto, "was almost lustfully hypersensitive to sex in print...
...whole memory of Hannibal is "a libel [on] a full-blooded folk." But "in what he perceived, in what he felt, in the nerve-ends of emotion, in the mysterious ferments of art which transform experience, he was a great mind-there has been no greater in American literature." DeVoto notes the almost Shakespearean abundance of life that floods Mark Twain's two greatest books-the "authority over the imagination of mankind" which gives them their strong mythical enchantment. Nevertheless, some readers may find it hard to agree that Huckleberry Finn is "as dark a book as Moby Dick...