Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This anthology of recently written British poetry, fiction and criticism is a painfully faithful reflection of current British life: drab, grey, intelligent, courageous...
...fiction is livelier. James Hanley's The Road, a tender tale of a sailor's discovery that his family has been blitzed, and Anna Kavan's Face of My People, a pathos-laden account of a neurotic veteran's resistance to psychoanalytical probing ("They've taken everything; let them not take my silence") are good, solid if not world-shaking stories. Also worth watching is William Sansom, who can't yet create characters but who has a captivating way with machinery...
Died. Lincoln Ross Colcord, 64, spinner of sea tales, authority on nautical lore; of coronary thrombosis; in Belfast, Me. Colcord created a long-remembered sensation in 1929 when he publicly debunked-Joan Lowell's best-selling "autobiographical" sea story, Cradle of the Deep, as so much romantic fiction, caused the Book-of-the-Month Club to offer refunds...
...this does not deny "The Stoic" its merits. As a story it is often good Dreiser, which is very good fiction indeed. Marked by the vitality and massive documentation typical of Dreiser, this extension of Cowperwood's activities into the London financial world at times hits with undeniable power. Although Dreiser never completed "The Stoic" he did live long enough to polish it far beyond the raggedness of "The Bulwark." This superiority inheres in the book's construction. Cowperwood--his business and his philanderings--occupies the stage at all times; hence there is none of the diffusion of energy that...
Amber Over Tokyo. Mott asks, but cannot answer, why the field of popular fiction has been so narrow. There have been no lastingly popular American novels on industry, the clipper ships, the rail roads, the Oregon Trail, immigration, the discovery of gold or oil, the movies, radio, or the New Deal. Readers could get good, solidly based historical novels on the fall of Rome or the battle of Waterloo, but not of the Lewis & Clark expedition...