Word: humoristic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sure to provoke a row when it comes out next month is Letters from the Earth, containing hitherto unpublished, antireligious essays by Humorist Mark Twain. In the guise of Satan writing to the Archangels Gabriel and Michael, Twain pictures man as the foolish and conceited victim of his own preposterous religious beliefs. Coming from manuscripts dated in the last few years before Twain's death in 1910, the book was pieced together by the late Bernard DeVoto in 1939. But the content so disturbed Twain's Christian Scientist daughter, Mrs. Clara Clemens Samossoud, now 88, that she refused...
...three literary giants in America in the 19th century's last decades, one, Mark Twain, evaded the strictures of prudery because he was a humorist and because he was Mark Twain. The second, Henry James, very nearly succeeded in turning the strictures into virtues. The third, and least, in some ways makes the most interesting case study. It was William Dean Howells. not Twain or James, who presided over American literature for 50 years, who fought the critical battles for realism, and who, as the country's first avowed realist, was righteously damned as a vulgarian...
...Lawyer. It is almost ironical that Ervin's reputation as a humorist has obscured his standing as one of Capitol Hill's most learned students...
...ways, Shut Up, He Explained is a curious book. For a generation to which Lardner is largely a distant figure of the 1920s (he died in 1933), familiar chiefly through textbooks and a few anthologies, it does not do full justice to the lasting appeal of the great American humorist. Nor is it likely to satisfy the Lardner buff (there are still a great many), who likes to sample his Lardneriana over the wide range offered by a box of Mother's Day chocolates. When Lardner was good, he was very, very good; when he was bad, he could...
...Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries. The humorist abandons gaiety, if not humor; in this bitter and wholly serious novel of a man's loss of faith, life is seen to be a cruel joke...