Word: fictioners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first sentence of the first story, An Habitation Enforced, a leggy prose takes the reader in stride: "It came without warning, at the very hour his hand was outstretched to crumple the Holz and Gunsberg Combine." The third and fourth stories, a political allegory and a science fiction (which predicts that in 2000 A.D. the dirigible will replace the airplane), are empty shows of the author's variety. He seems to do everything easily, and nothing really well. But in the fifth story, A Deal in Cotton (a wild yarn, all fever and cannibals, about an attempt to raise...
...Gallantry. Nevertheless, it is Rush who is the hero of Bring Out Your Dead, a ghoulishly fascinating history of Philadelphia's great plague. Historian Powell's conscientious grubbing among the records pays off with a cumulative effect of horror and heroism seldom found in the most artful fiction. As the fever took hold, government in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, slowed down and finally stopped. When even President Washington pointedly delayed his return from Mt. Vernon, lesser men could hardly be blamed for getting away if they could...
...love with sensitive Niall, who is the illegitimate son of the singer's wife, in her own day a popular dancer. The only legitimate fruit of the muses' union is daughter Celia, who is as sedate and unromantic as a registered ccw-the invariable fate, in such fiction, of those unfortunate enough to have been born in wedlock. Maria has become a popular actress; Niall, a composer of popular song hits; Celia, a self-sacrificing homebody. But all three have reached John Marquand's "point of no return" with the conviction that they have frittered away their...
From Dumas to Shellabarger, no significant change has occurred in the plots and protagonists of cloak-&-dagger fiction. Few of the customers who bought a million copies of both Author Shellabarger's Captain from Castile (1945) and Prince of Foxes (1947) would have it any different. Even so, scholarly ex-Princeton Professor Shellabarger gives them a little more than their money's worth. For all its gaudily costumed corn, The King's Cavalier is built on a solid base of research which pays off in such things as a manor house painstakingly reconstructed right down...
Where Are They Now? Editor Greenough Smith, rich in journalistic honors, died in 1935. Deprived of his sure touch, the Strand declined rapidly. In World War II, the shortage of good fiction-and paper to print it on-hit the magazine even harder. When the Strand's traditional format and cover were discarded in favor of a pocket-sized, sophisticated approach, the magazine lost the last traits of its old character without developing a new one. Complained new Editor MacDonald Hastings, who took over in 1944: "Where are the Conan Doyles today, and where are the readers who want...