Word: hankses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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THE HISTORY OF ROME HANKS AND KINDRED MATTERS-Joseph Stanley Pennell-Scribners ($2.75).
The big guns of U.S. newspaper book reviewing greeted Rome Hanks last fort night with the most thunderous salvo that has welcomed a first novel since Gone With The Wind. It was a "superb achieve ment" to the New York Times and "a beautiful and terrible book" to the Herald...
Some reviewers entered reservations ("exhibitionist antics . . . abominable and irritating preciosity, a self-conscious pre tentiousness"). But the effect of their praise, plus lavish advertisements, was immediate. Rome Hanks sold out its first edition overnight.
Buyers content with simple violence and vice got their money's worth. But if Rome Hanks were sold with a money-back guarantee, its publishers might live to regret its boom. Overwritten, exaggerated, affected and confused, it is an incoherent patchwork of incidents stretching from Waterloo to Roosevelt II...
But in spite of its surface absurdities and wild overwriting, Rome Hanks is a noteworthy book. The qualities which distinguish it, and which led reviewers to praise its author's vitality, are 1) an acute disgust with the oversimplifications and idealizations of most historical fiction, 2) a pounding, repetitious...