Word: lifes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Brill foibles, heightened the picturesqueness of the story, diluted its satire, toned down the dialogue ("so damn screwy" to "so queer"), cut out Narrator Calder's cynical reflections on love ("all lovers are consummate bores"), on writing popular fiction for the big magazines ("a somewhat ghastly parody on life"), blotted out one character (the narrator's mistress) entirely. All told, Literary Agent Carl Brandt cut about 90,000 words from Wickford Point, before submitting it to the Post...
...main story concerns Ray's life on the range-punching cows with such picturesque partners as Absolute Jones, Greasy Oscar, Springtime, hunting with the Piegan Indians, getting mixed up in an Indian war. It is cowboys-&-Indians romance plus a heroine. But Author Boyd's cowboys, Indians, adventures, "cussing ladies," homesteaders, plains and hills are as real as oldtime calico, make the Wild West almost as gripping for grownups as it once was in the dime novels of one's youth...
Since 1919-the Herman Melville centennial-the "Melville Revival" has provoked several biographies, some 500 essays, a flood of new Melville editions (54 U. S. and English editions of Moby Dick alone), and a consuming curiosity about Melville's scantily documented life. Biographers' main source material has been Melville's "autobiographical" novels. From these comes the portrait of the brooding, misanthropic philosopher and mystic, who went to sea in flight from suicide, won brief success with his South Seas romances (Typee, Omoo, et a/.) and Moby Dick, died a forgotten man after 20 bitter last years...
...turn to allegory, he says, was a literary mistake, aided and abetted by Boston and Manhattan intellectuals. Hawthorne, who used to lie in the hay talking with Melville about time and destiny, characterized Melville's metaphysics as enough to "compel a man to swim for his life...
...romancing is his account, in White-Jacket, of falling overboard on his 14-month voyage home on the frigate United States. Probably one of the most vivid escapes from death in literature, it is the scene which prompted Biographer Lewis Mumford to observe that Melville had now "faced life and death, not as abstractions, but as concrete events. . . ." But Melville never fell overboard in his life. Says Author Anderson: Melville suffered this vicarious experience in an account by a seaman who fell overboard from the frigate United States 18 years before...