Word: doren
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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (285 pp.)-American Men of Leffers Series-Mark Van Doren-Sloane...
...part, Mark Van Doren's new biography of Hawthorne is no exception. When it deals with Hawthorne's life, it follows all the smooth old academic stereotypes. Whenever it touches on Hawthorne's writing, however, the book picks up interest at once. Of The Wives of the Dead, one of the most poignant stories in the English language, he says: "No reader of it will forget the speed with which its interior lights up and stays lit with a significance almost too delicate to name." Such stories do not date, for, as Van Doren says, they deal...
...Hard Knowledge. Van Doren's contribution to the subject of Hawthorne thus amounts to an impressive, if interrupted, essay on what Hawthorne had to say and how successfully he said it. That contribution could have been greater if Van Doren had 1) thrown away the biographical passages, or 2) fastened his attention on the man Hawthorne really...
Tribune Books Editor Irita Van Doren said her sampling was broader than S.R.L. indicated. Said she: "If anybody could suggest any real way to get around weaknesses in the bestseller lists, I would be glad to do it." For the moment, the Times and the Tribune planned no changes...
Other books of verse by older writers: Robinson Jeffers' crabbed The Double Axe, which most critics resented for its arrogant, unyielding isolationism; Paterson, Book II, a homey description of small-city life by William Carlos Williams, a New Jersey doctor who versifies between paying patients; Mark Van Doren's pleasant New Poems...