Word: kit
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Electric Runabout, with only a few novelists making a serious attempt to investigate the social influence of this piece of machinery in U. S. life. Exceptions have been Robert Coates's lyric descriptions of driving in Yesterday's Burdens, Sherwood Anderson's awed observations in Kit Brandon. Last week a 29-year-old novelist made a bold attempt to correct this omission with an extraordinary, 415-page work of fiction in which the automobile, with its moving parts, time payments and advantages as a theatre for youthful lovemaking, served as the central figure. Not exactly a novel...
...KIT BRANDON-Sherwood Anderson- Scribner...
...Kit Brandon is the wild daughter of a Virginia mountaineer. One of her earliest memories is of ringing a bell to warn her father at the still that the sheriff was coming for him. A tall, slender, dark-eyed girl, Kit runs away from home at 15, after her father reveals an unpaternal interest in her. She gets a job in a textile mill, learns fast. Kit is befriended by a hard, homely girl, feels humiliated by being called a "lint head" by the townspeople, is loved by a boy dying of tuberculosis. It is at this period...
Marriage takes Kit out of the working class, lifts her into the family of a powerful bootlegger named Tom Halsey. Despising her husband, Halsey's weak-kneed son, she breaks away from him as soon as she discovers that the comfort he provides cannot end her restlessness. She loves to drive, gets a job running liquor over the mountains. Once she drives her car into the car of Federal agents to prevent the capture of a valuable liquor stock. She becomes notorious as the girl rumrunner, dresses expensively, always carries a telegram saying her husband has been hurt...
With this spinal cord of a narrative to hold it together, Kit Brandon is less diffuse than Sherwood Anderson's earlier novels, and Kit's candid puzzlement lacks the somewhat forced naïveté that weakened Beyond Desire and Dark Laughter. Sometimes the author intrudes with speculations about machinery, forest conservation, unemployment, strikes, the TVA, but his interruptions are brief and often effective. "The reader should bear in mind," he says simply, in describing Kit's marriage, "that Kit Brandon was and is a real person, a living American woman. How much of her real story...