Word: kapstein
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...writers new this year, it seemed likely that few would ever ripen to replace those whom the year killed. Still, there were some good ones. I. J. Kapstein's Something of a Hero ($2.75) was an honest, compassionate image of a U.S. city and of the obligations and shortcomings of U.S. democracy. William Faulkner's younger brother John, in Men Working ($2.50), showed neither influence nor need of any. River Rat ($2.50), by Daniel Lundberg, showed a fresh comic talent; Felice Swados, in House of Fury ($2), showed remarkable sure-footedness with new and difficult material: adolescent emotions...
Israel James Kapstein (Brown '26), undergraduate friend of pinwheel-minded S. J. Perelman and the late brilliant Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), went back to Brown in 1927, has taught English there ever since. Although he publishes his first novel at the dangerously retarded age of 37, it is a good...
They are warmly and well drawn, so adeptly organized that for 596 pages they move almost as actively as a play. But unluckily Kapstein is so intensely concerned with them as social symbols that they sometimes wear their humanity like false beards, and the play becomes a pageant. Yet the total effect is a massive, honest, compassionate and convincing image of a community...