Word: leas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Lea wanted to explain this picture of the festival of bulls to Americans. As a painter, he first thought of drawing pictures of it, but he changed his mind. What he wanted to show was not just a painting of the festival. He wanted to explain how the bulls affect the lives of the people who work with them, how the spirit of the fight captures the toreador, how he rassles with fear, and how fear sometimes wins. This picture of a peoples' spirit behind the great pageant of the corrida required a novel. Tom Lea called his novel...
...climax of the story, when Luis regains his fighting spirit on the sands of Cuenca arena, on the surface resembles the ending of a high school sports story, but it is essential to Tom Lea's study of the bull fighter. As his fear vanishes. Luis regains the spirit of the bull fight, and the painting of the sport is completed...
...Lea had a difficult problem in creating a style that would reveal the emotions of the matador at work and tell what is happening in the arena. In describing the fight, the author presents the thoughts and feelings of the matador. At times, it is difficult to tell exactly what the bull has done, but the rapid tempo and the strong emotional grip of this description make up for the factual problem...
Novelist Tom Lea's father was mayor of El Paso, Tex., and he grew up among ranchers. Lea, however, became no cattle-raising Texan; he became an artist. As such, on commission for LIFE, he landed on Peleliu in September 1944, with an assault wave of U.S. marines and lived through one of the bloodiest island battles of the Pacific war. Since his return he has been hanging around Mexican bull rings with a new ear for the heartbeats of men in danger...
...Second Tequila. So The Brave Bulls, Lea's first novel, is a war book of a kind that most critics forgot to expect. The Brave Bulls has nothing, ostensibly, to do with the war, but the sand of the bull ring in this book is also the sand of the Peleliu beaches; the black and powerful truth that fills the book is the truth of death that marines learned on Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge...