Word: latelys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Marquand's last six novels, from The Late George Apley to B.F.'s Daughter, have sold 2,600,000 copies. Three of them were book-club choices (H.M. Pulham, Esquire and So Little Time, Book-of-the-Month; B.F.'s Daughter, Literary Guild) ; three of them made box-office movies. Whatever the critics may say about Point of No Return (Marquand says, "I take a dim view of all serious critics-I don't know any who've had a kind word to say for me, ever since I was a little...
When he tired of writing slicks exclusively and turned to "serious" novels, his first one, The Late George Apley, got him the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, critical acclaim and a big, new reading public. Proceeds from the Apley play and movie settled him even more firmly on Easy Street, and since 1944 his B-O-M job (a part-time reading chore) has brought him another $20,000 a year. Practical, a lover of comfort and the good things of life (including, among others, three cars, two Scotches before dinner), Marquand is by no means contemptuous of money and is mightily...
There were other differences. One summer Christina suggested they take their vacation abroad. "Instead I took her on a canoe trip to Minnesota and Ontario." When they were living in Boston and he told her about his idea for The Late George Apley, she remarked, as he remembers it: "That's a good book to write if you want to leave Boston, that's all." They were divorced...
...continued murder stories about an obsequious Japanese detective. He had discovered that he could do the Mr. Moto stories in half the time by dictating them, and he decided to take on Apley too. Most of his friends thought it was a mistake and few besides his publisher, the late Alfred McIntyre of Little, Brown, encouraged him. When it won him the Pulitzer Prize, the first thing he did was to get on the phone and rib the people who had told him to stick to magazine fiction...
...creator. He went on writing about Moto, "but it gradually came over me that slick-magazine writing -where the hero slips on a banana peel and the heiress falls in love with him and they get married and go off to Monte Carlo-was baloney. It was very late and very slowly and largely in a spirit of revolt against this business that I began to write something different. In Apley I drew on a life in which I had a stake. You have to write about what you have lived to get at some worthwhile truth...