Word: fadiman
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Christina Stead is a 35-year-old Australian novelist who has been a critics' favorite, a popular failure. According to Rebecca West she is "one of the few people really original we have produced since the War." According to Clifton Fadiman she is "the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf." If readers ignore her latest novel, House of All Nations, they will have to do so in the way a pedestrian ignores a landslide in the road-by walking around...
...Information Please is an inversion of the current question game and spelling bee vogue. It lets the audience ask the questions. Master of ceremonies is Book Critic Clifton Fadiman, who assembles a board of masterminds for the answering. Masterminds include Franklin Pierce Adams ("F.P.A."), Paul de Kruif, Stuart Chase. Listeners supply questions at $2 per question used, $5 per question not correctly answered. Twenty-four hours after the first broadcast last week the audience had submitted 800 questions...
James Laughlin is not alone in his quest for the purging of our language. At the end of his selection of the last year's best books, Clifton Fadiman made a plea to young authors that they write with more care towards the use of words. Wilson Follett complained that the definition of a sentence as "a complete thought expressed in words" had become obsolete. The economist, Stuart Chase, in a recent provocative article, urged that the way to make language a better vehicle for ideas was to pursue the science of semantics, which teaches that the two main sins...
...literary work as indication of the mental processes of a class. But even admitting the significance of the author of "A Farewell to Arms" in this respect, there is a further doubt. If the members of the present college generation confess themselves truly pictured by Hemingway, and, as Fadiman says, "as vitally maimed as the hero of The Sun Also Rise," they confess themselves beaten, not by the war, with which they had no direct contact, but by the depression. A great many dire things indeed may be predicted from such a standpoint...
...reading Hemingway, however, or, in reading any work of friction, it is possible to read oneself into the character of the leading personage. This apparently is what Mr. Fadiman has done, Where others become an imaginary individual for an hour, dropping the false robes with the book, he has so wound and entwined himself in the Hemingway toils that he is unable to escape. Further, he assumes that all the young readers of Mr. Hemingway have done the same, an idea, fortunately, somewhat fallacious. Many may regard the author of "Death in the Afternoon", as a fit subject for Thurber...