Word: manuscript
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Evil Is Inefficient. A fulltime novelist from then on, Shute clung to his methodical engineering habits. From 9:30 a.m. to noon, he typed at his manuscript, seated at a secondhand rolltop desk that his father had given him. A year was par for a novel. As critics and readers quickly learned, his characters behaved with a realistic mixture of human strength and frailty. Storyteller Shute was peculiarly immune to the lilt and color of prose, but he fashioned his sentences with pane-of-glass clarity...
...Roman Catholic priest, he submitted to the prohibition of his church against publishing his writings or teaching his ideas. Until his death at 73, in 1955, The Phenomenon of Man had to be circulated privately in mimeographed form. A friend to whom he left the manuscript arranged for its publication...
...about his craft. The company he kept added a satanic touch by being mad, neurasthenic, and sexually deviate or profligate. The most colorful of the odd lot was Charles Augustus Howell. One of his exploits was to dig up the coffin of Elizabeth Rossetti by moonlight to retrieve a manuscript her grieving husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had buried with the body. Howell housed his wife, a bevy of artistically inclined mistresses, and half a dozen children under the same roof. Howell kept the girls busy forging art works, and in particular a set of obscene etchings, which he peddled...
...Evil Creator. The manuscript of this so-called Gospel attributed to "Doubting Thomas," the disciple who insisted on verifying Jesus' bodily resurrection by touching his wounds (John 20: 25-28), is dated somewhere between A.D. 350 and A.D. 425. But, say the translators, the original "goes back much earlier. We are dealing here with a translation or an adaptation in Sahidic Coptic of a work the primitive text of which must have been produced in Greek about 140 A.D., and which was based on even more ancient sources...
During World War I, James Joyce mailed his manuscript of Ulysses, bit by bit, from Zurich to London, and for a time British censors suspected the book of being an enemy code. It was a prophetic incident; for decades Joyce would inspire battles between the code sniffers and the cult worshipers. Once when asked why he put so many puzzlers into his works, Joyce replied: "To occupy my critics for 300 years." Richard Ellmann, professor of English at Northwestern University, worked a mere seven years on this huge biography, but its great and fascinating merit is that it demystifies Joyce...