Word: icebox
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Southern California. There he ultimately carved out his niche in the annals of American literature, with books like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. His hard-bitten, journalistic style would make him one of the most frequently imitated authors of this century. The Baby in the Icebox, and Other Short Fiction, a new collection of many of Cain's previously out of print early stories and dialogues, traces his development from a moderately well-known yet inconsequential magazine writer in the East to the father of a minor literary movement in California...
...characters were mostly poor workers or drifters who believed earnestly in the possibility of a better life, yet had no idea about where to find it. His earliest published fiction was in the form of brief, sharply satirical dialogues. The two dialogues included in the Baby in the Icebox collection, "The Hero" and "Theological Interlude," both originally appeared in the early '20s in The American Mercury, a magazine run by Cain's friend, the satirist H.L. Mencken. Cain overloads these pieces with his own impression of lower middle class dialect. His satire of the characters is not balanced...