Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Said the report: "The enjoyment of some reading (magazine fiction, popular novels) requires no study; but for the full enjoyment of the best literature, study is necessary. [This study] is a discipline. In all civilized societies it has been honored as one. Directors of our public schools show an increasing tendency to ignore this fact. . . . The sentimental idea that literature is first and last a dreamland of desire has led many school administrators, under the impression that they are being progressive, to permit the old-fashioned hard work of grammar, language, and letters to be displaced by an elaborate picnic...
...thought can flow together and that this cultural Mississippi, though full of snags and shallows, may be one of the brightest things moving in the world. Raintree County is a historical novel of Indiana by an Indiana boy; it is also a philosophical novel (a rare thing in U.S. fiction), and a studied work of art that is striking enough to court comparison, in method at least, with the Ulysses of James Joyce...
...Neill's Mourning Becomes Electro) was regrettable. John Ford's The Fugitive drowned in romantic beauty and in solemn unreality, but had majesty of ambition and continuous intensity of treatment. In The Macomber Affair, Zoltan Korda made movie sense out of a piece of Hemingway's fiction...
Writer George Reavey is a man who can write placidly about a national literature in chains. "Russian society," he writes, "has not lost the motive power of belief, and where belief is, there a measure of intolerance is bound to thrive." Even the decree that Russian detective and adventure fiction must fall into line "is understandable in so far as this sort of fiction will be largely read by the youth of the country and the state has an immediate interest in the shaping of the outlook of the younger generation...
...those interested, the usual good poetry appears, this time by John Ashbery and Ora May Hulli; same with the criticism, by Kenneth Koch ad Robert Hunter. Now, with a well-balanced issue, there is no need to say nice things about these lost. Of course the fiction has its flaws, but they are the same kind of shortcomings that can be found in the works of any good writer, not the puerile once generally found in college literary magazines. The excellence of this issue may be due to its inevitable growth, or it may be just an accident. Give...