Word: humor
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...book which is as anecdotal as a Walter Winchell column. Whit Burnett discourses on the traditions of U. S. humor, jumps to an account of "Graebisch University," a joke institution which met at a Manhattan attorney's house for semi-scatologic and pedantic wisecracking; of moving Lewis Gannett's lake in Connecticut; the history of Story Magazine from its mimeographed inception (67 copies) in Vienna in 1931. He transcribes the cute sayings of his son David, letters from Saroyan, wisecracks about his appendectomy and tonsillectomy (even his surgeon was literary), hypochondria on two continents, occasionally throws...
...contrasts between the letter and the spirit of religion. His plays are allegorical in form and emotional in appeal. Their very simplicity is a stage asset, has the strength of black against white. Carroll is not yet really important, but he is Irish: he has rich-juiced dialogue, abundant humor, powerful characterizations. Mellow, charming Canon Lavelle and frigid, heartless Father Shaughnessy possibly provide too pat a contrast. But both are brilliant stage characters, inspire the belief that Carroll will some day achieve an even greater creation-mere human beings...
...death of his wife, gives way to drink and inertia. An accident of ward politics makes this picturesque bum of crucial importance in a municipal election. How this situation affects him and his lively little son and daughter is revealed by Director Kanin with a maximum of warm, perceptive humor, a decent minimum of emotional climaxes...
This week he publishes his 15th book. Called The Wild Palms (Random House, $2.50), it is a wild, outraged and outrageous novel, which boils over with outlandish humor and grotesque incident. Part of it is a swift story, funny and slightly maddening. Part of it is involved psychological analysis mixed with melodrama, just plain maddening. In most of his previous books Faulkner has written of a mythical Southern town. In The Wild Palms he has a new hero, but he has not left the South. This time his hero is the Mississippi...
Moral. Had Faulkner been content to let The Wild Palms rest with the convict's story, the book might have become a classic of involuntary adventure. It is a pulsing, racing story, a kind of hysterical Huckleberry Finn, its humor at once grotesque and shrewd, its moral at once grim and humane. The convict, with his thoughtless courage, his exasperation at the titanic forces unleashed against him, is Faulkner's most original and attractive character. And the whole book is conceived in the grand manner. Faulkner makes you feel the terrible fragility of man's levees, boats...