Word: fictioners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this whole collection of 25 short stories by V. S. (for Victor Sawdon) Pritchett. At 55, Pritchett is perhaps the best literary critic now writing in English. He is also a subtle interpreter of national character and environment (The Spanish Temper) and an occasional but brilliant dabbler in fiction. He calls his short stories "the only kind of writing that has given me pleasure [and] always elated me." The elation is shared by the reader...
...first-class novelist has worked in the southern hemisphere." This book does nothing to alter that situation. Before his writing lifted him into rarefied financial levels, Shute was an aeronautical engineer who helped design and fly Britain's dirigible R.100 on its transatlantic flight of 1930.* His fiction has some of the improbable, inflated, but often entertaining quality of the lighter-than-air-machines...
Basque-born Unamuno had a Spanish flair for paradox-he insisted that the fictional Don Quixote was a greater and a realer man than Don Quixote's creator, Cervantes. This kind of jugglery between the balloons of fiction and the cannonballs of fact made Unamuno an enigmatic figure-and in Catholic, reactionary Spain, a suspect and controversial one. In 1891, when he was 27, he became professor of Greek at Salamanca, and was appointed rector ten years later. He stoutly rejected any obligation to impose coherence on his thought and backed up his stand by the consistent inconsistency...
...Fred Gipson, onetime newsman and veteran of the pulps, has written double insurance into his third novel. Not only is Old Yeller a mongrel of rare courage and devotion; his 14-year-old master, Travis, totes about as much man on his boyish frame as any adolescent in recent fiction...
...Mencken, who detested democracy, ironically democratized U.S. life and art. He made Babbitt-land so culture-conscious that Babbitt disappeared. He lampooned frauds in high places so lustily that no public figure has been sacrosanct since. Partly because of his blasts at the prissy genteel tradition, much of American fiction became as unblinkingly honest as fact. His vitality seems to have been reasserted with his death early this year. Angoff's "portrait from memory," for which the author must have started scratching notes on his first day of work in the Mercury office, follows Mencken's own Minority...