Word: fictioneering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This sense of self-importance, this humorlessness, is characteristic of an approach to criticism--and to fiction--that has no vitality and that is typical of the Advocate. A magazine recently said that there are "images of linear discreteness" in William Faulkner's fiction. That magazine was a literary quarterly but it might just as well have been the Advocate. So the Advocate's editors should think about Faulkner's answer when the New York Times asked him what he thought of that piece of criticism. "Look," he said, "I'm just a writer. Not a literary...
Roosevelt and Hopkins is full of details that make it far more colorful than historical fiction. Once when Roosevelt complained that he never could have peanuts because his secret service would have to check each one, Sherwood and Rosenman slipped out and got him a bagful which he kept under his coat and devoured. His aides were quick to spot the chief's moods and behave accordingly. Sometimes it would be: "God help anybody who asks him for any favors today." Again: "He feels so good he'll be telling Cotton Ed Smith that it's perfectly...
...them some of the best writing that the magazine has yet published. In the prose, to put the poetry aside for a moment, there are good ideas, good dialogue, and good description in the better moments of the better stories. The result is readability, a fairly important aspect of fiction that has been almost totally absent from Harvard's and Radcliffe's literary magazines in the recent past. But even the very best of these stories crics out time and gain for cutting, for clarification, for a different word here, for an additional sentence there. And that...
...teem with fine sayings and magniloquent epigrams, gorgeous images, and fantastic locutions," said Critic W. E. Henley, that "the mind would welcome a little dullness as a glad relief." Had he had the virtue of simplicity, in addition to his other talents, he might have been to English fiction what Shakespeare is to its poetry and drama...
...sometimes grows wearisome. It is distinguished for its portrait of Bishop Blasco de Valero. The devout prelate, self-sacrificing, presiding with terrible humility and conscientiousness over the trials of heretics, is a masterly portrait, equal to Maugham's best, and belonging well up in the gallery of modern fiction...