Word: gusto
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Wide Open Town" is disappointing. It does not nearly approach the gusto and vigor of his former work. Rather, it strikes one as being a carbon copy, slightly blurred at the edges, of "Singermann." The failure this time of the author to portray this particular phase of the American scene is primarily due of the American scene is primarily due to the besetting sin of his reliance on "local color." Mr. Brinig has grown up in the city he pictures, he knows its legends and its individuality at first hand--and he had done nothing more than photograph them...
...Irish miner, for Zola, an alluring if somewhat incongruous prostitute, forms what plot and motivation there is. With a painstaking that is almost embarrassing. Mr. Brinig devotes himself to an exhaustive analysis of his characters, and finally they, under this pressure, disappear into a rarified atmosphere, incompatible with the gusto of his background. The hero has been on dowed with a sensitive and poetic nature that it patently ridiculous in view of his mentality...
...author is imbued with the belief that the future of American letters lies in the characterization of regional life and setting, he has failed miserably in his exposition. It is doubly regrettable when when one considers the undeniable beauty of his writing, the gusto and frankness of it. It is to be hoped that he will bring to his next novel a new setting and the same quality of expression which characterized "Singermann." "Wide Open Town" is a definite retrogression...
...Lady Mosley's uncle, Joseph Leiter of Chicago, still relates with gusto in the pages of Who's Who how in 1897 he cornered the wheat market for his father "to such an extent as to make him, at the beginning of 1898, the largest individual holder of wheat in the history of the grain trade...
...tabloid press had, indeed, turned up Vivian Gordon's past much as a bear snouting for ants turns over a stone. Even the conservative papers devoted column upon column to the murder mystery and its ramifications. But the sensational papers tackled Vivian's story with a mad gusto, especially Joseph Medill Patterson's big little Daily News...