Word: familiarity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Published last week was the second of the series, The Puritan Strain. Shrewdly made up of the time-tested ingredients of the familiar triangle plot, it tells the story of 40-year-old Elizabeth Condit Gates who, like the heroine of many a popular romance, fell high-mindedly in love with her husband's best friend. Author Baldwin takes many liberties with the conventions of sentimental fiction: 1) in showing Elizabeth clinging to her lover despite her regret at the pain she caused her husband; 2) going on with her plans to remarry despite her agony...
...Lefty in a local theatre which seats slightly over 600 persons. The performance was S.R.O., and the box-office receipts showed over 900 paid admissions. The play was performed exactly as produced in New York except for damns instead of goddamns. This is ironical inasmuch as anyone who is familiar with the play knows well that the profanity is the least objectionable element from the censors' point of view...
Such readers, on opening Negro Du Bois's earnest analysis of the post-war years, will find themselves in an historical wonderland in which all familiar scenes and landmarks have been changed or swept away, surrounded by old historic facts in strange and novel dress, by new facts of whose existence they did not dream, by famed figures, from Lincoln to Charles Sumner, so disguised as to be almost unrecognizable. They will find that the Civil War lasted not four years, but 20; that it was decided, not by superior military strength or strategy, but by a general strike...
...Black Reconstruction, Negro-freeing Lincoln is overshadowed by Negro-loving Thaddeus Stevens. Grant stands out as less impressive than an ex-slave abolitionist named Douglass, and a crowd of strangers shoulders familiar figures from the scene. If the book has a personal hero, it is Charles Sumner of Massachusetts who talked much of the Negro in the Senate but refused to hobnob socially with him outside. Yet if readers remain immersed in Du Bois's murky history until their eyes have grown accustomed to its gloom, if they are willing to feel their way cautiously through a tangled thicket...
...Authors' League of America was moved to come to the defense of the harassed New Theatre League. Declared Vice President Elmer Davis (History of the New York Times, Friends of Mr. Sweeney) of the Authors' League: "The tactics employed to suppress presentation of Waiting for Lefty are familiar and timeworn. Technicalities of the fire laws, obsolete statutes from the old 'blue laws' period, red tape in connection with licenses -all of these are used to bar the play from theatres or to stop performances. But the real issue of freedom of opinion and the right...