Word: lamkin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fault of Speed Lamkin '48 that the decay of Southern aristocracy and its struggle against industrialism are old stuff to most of us by now. One cannot expect a novelist in his early twenties to present many fresh insights into situations that have been so completely explored by more seasoned writers...
...although Lamkin's tale of an aristocratic family's decline in a back water Louisiana town seems to have been told before, the author's thorough understanding of his subject matter prevents his first novel from becoming merely an echo, hollow as the life of his virginal, bachelor story-teller, Henry Nelson...
TIGER IN THE GARDEN (278 pp.)-Speed Lamkin-Houghton Mifflin...
...their literary elders is: write only about the things you know. It is perfectly good advice, as sound as it is trite, but sometimes discouraging to youngsters who discover that what they know has long been grist for other writers' mills. Young (22) Louisiana-born, Harvard-bred Speed Lamkin knows a lot about the decline and decay of the old plantation set, who made small talk while energetic commoners made big money and powered the New South. In his first novel, Tiger in the Garden, Lamkin boldly washes some old sectional linen in public, as if it hadn...
...true that Tiger in the Garden is made up of old ingredients: miscegenation, aristocratic drunks and flowerlike ladies, languid Southern talk and fiery Southern tempers. By now any writer, even Faulkner, can use them only at the risk of flirting with caricature. It is nonetheless to Author Lamkin's credit that he has almost succeeded in bringing an old story to life and already writes well enough to handle...