Word: dreiser
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Still, in nearly 50 years in publishing, Cerf never fell afoul of an author as severely as did his first boss in publishing, Horace Liveright. Just as he was about to leave for California in the '20s, Liveright persuaded Theodore Dreiser to let him try to sell An American Tragedy to the movies - with Liveright to get the agent's commission. Dreiser, who was convinced that no one would nibble, readily agreed...
When he returned, Liveright invited Dreiser to lunch and announced his triumph - a movie deal for the sum of $85,000. Dreiser was delighted at the unexpected windfall, but considerably less delighted when he was reminded of Liveright's commission. "Do you mean you're going to take my money?" he asked. "Just at this moment, the waiter brought the coffee in," writes Cerf, the ever faithful reporter. "Suddenly Dreiser seized his cup and threw the steaming coffee in Liveright's face. [He] got up from the table without a word and marched out of the restaurant...
...Thin Red Line (1962) impressed some reviewers. Jones, like Dreiser, often infused his fiction with a force that transcended the clumsy writing. Before long, however, even his primitive power seemed to have fizzled away. Such novels as Go to the Widow-Maker (1961) and The Merry Month of May (1971) were not only badly written but also burdened by fatuous philosophizing...
Died. Hyman Kraft, 76, playwright and author; of complications arising from injuries suffered when he was struck by a bicycle; in Manhattan. Kraft wrote his first play at 33, later collaborated with Theodore Dreiser on the screenplay for An American Tragedy and became a journeyman playwright of comedies and musicals, among them Café Crown and Top Banana, a caustic, dizzy homage to comedy that Phil Silvers made into...
Brutal Naturalism. If Garcia Marquez is Latin America's Faulkner, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa is aesthetically, if not stylistically, its Dreiser. His first novel, The City of the Dogs, was a brutal slab of naturalism about life and violent death at a Peruvian military school for problem youth-a place not unlike the institution Vargas Llosa attended in the early 1950s. Officials at the school ensured the author a wide readership and international attention by publicly burning 1,000 copies of his book...