Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...from a window, cobbled with yellow faces, it teems; adventures shoulder and jostle; events prod each other's ribs; Sentimentality picks the pocket of Romance. One is forcibly reminded that nothing is quite so dull as unvaried liveliness. It is a book that achieves a forthright swagger that the fiction of this latter day has largely lost. Beauty in distress is white; villainy is black indeed. It relinquishes, at the same time, whatever graces of subtlety and invention the fiction of this latter day has gained...
STRAWS AND PRAYER-BOOKS?James Branch Cabell?McBride ($2.50). All life, Mr. Cabell points out, is a pleasant fiction. "No child plays with a straw: he brandishes a sword. . . . The young man, exultant, terrified, touches and uncovers, not an expanse of epidermis and small hairs and sweat glands, but the body of a goddess . . . and the aged clasp not a prayer-book but the key to eternal bliss." "Reflection finds the circumstance unfortunate that most of the agreeable actions of life are either forbidden or else deplorably behedged with restrictions...
...Most successful of all auto-creative fiction-mongers is Sherwood Anderson. His Story-Teller's Story is just that. He tells the story of his own life frankly and revealingly, just as honestly and just as skilfully as if he had never existed outside his own fertile imagination. He writes his novels as if they were biography. Now he makes of his own life a novel no whit inferior to those which have won him the right to a hearing...
Deliberations followed. It was decided to give an Academy gold medal to Walter Hampden, actor, "for good diction on the stage"; an Institute gold medal to Edith Wharton, author, for her achievements in fiction. Ossip Gabrilowitsch, son-in-law of Mark Twain, late Academician, played for the session. In the absence of Professor William Milligan Sloane, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, chancellor, presided...
Even Americans, if thoughtful, will realize that a hybrid, even as American culture is hybrid, he caught the vigor and rude strength of life in newly settled California. His clear, pointed style has swept the ceremonious diction of the Victorian writers from American fiction; and above all, he express that gaiety and resilience which are the distinguishing American characteristics. Bret Harte is the prophet of humor and humanity, but like most prophets he is honored everywhere but in his own land...