Word: magnum
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Romain Rolland wrote an epic about an individual (Jean Christophe); John Galsworthy wrote one about a family (The Forsyte Saga); but Jules Romains' magnum opus will seek comparison with an earlier, more comprehensive epic: La Comedie Humaine of Honoré de Balzac. No mere tetralogy, its author himself does not say how many volumes will go to make up the whole. Its purpose: to give a true picture of Paris in the 20th Century. No individual, no family history could adequately cover so broad a scene. Says Author Romains: "What I see before my eyes is life...
Though Jewry has given the world many a magnum opus, including Christendom's best-known book, few true-blue Jewish novels aim at or succeed in putting Christian readers in a state of grace. Solal does just that; it is a wild, melodramatic romance, stuffed with grotesque comedy, Old Testament lamentations, sensual psalms, shrewd cynicism and shrewder kindliness, ending finally in pure parable. When Solal appeared in Paris in 1930, even the French literary press sputtered : "A great Jewish novel . . . a great book . . . tumultuous . . . explosive . . . overbrimming...
...that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children, Pound has been given a wide berth by U. S. publishers and U. S. critics, but his European reputation is nothing to sneeze at. In bringing out the first U. S. edition of Pound's magnum opus alert Publisher Farrar shows that he has heard a thing or two. On the jacket of A Draft of XXX Cantos he quotes...
...beacon is to be left at Newark for airlines to test the needed new equipment (a 15-lb. receiver for the landing beam) and for airline pilots to get practice. It constitutes the magnum opus of Col. Clarence Marshall Young, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics, whose routine resignation was on file last week, and his first aide, Col. Harry Harmon Blee. He was ready to demonstrate it last month when his test pilot, Marshall S. ("Maury") Boggs, who had made innumerable blind landings, crashed to death in broad daylight on a joyhop in California...
...Eugene O'Neill had thought of it first, the theme of "The Sacred Flame," now at the Peabody Playhouse, would have been tortured into a drama of epic grandcur. It has all the essentials of an O'Neill magnum opus; there's murder, and adultery, and starved sexuality, and problems of passion galore. It might very well have been worked up by America's foremost tragedian into a magnificent scream-fest, with an hour out for supper and a year's run on Broadway...