Word: marquands
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...world, essentially, of the small New England town, the big New England town and, sometimes, New York. It was the world which James Gould Cozzens also made his own, of businessmen, bankers, lawyers, doctors, writers. Marquand had no sense that such professions were too mundane to provide human drama, although he chose to avoid the more violent forms of love, death and despair...
...guts' -I sometimes find myself thinking, and a part of the old restlessness comes back"). Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. tries to break out of the Army closed circuit, away from the old ways, the old wife, the old family-but in the end he goes home, as all Marquand heroes must...
Often the Marquand hero does not try to break out but to break in. He is the middle-aged American who is fighting, says Alfred Kazin, "not for freedom from convention, as George Apley did, but for conventions-standards of belief and behavior-that will allow him to function as a human being in a world where beliefs are shared.1' He is troubled by the materialist itch of American life, whether he is Charley Gray, the nice poor boy who wants to be a nice rich man but still plays by the rules, or Willis Wayde, who has torn...
...have to write about what you have lived to get at some worthwhile truth," said Marquand, and once he gave up the light fiction, the historical novels and the Oriental adventure stories about Mr. Moto with which he learned his trade, he wrote about a life in which he had a vast emotional stake. The Late George Apley reached back to an earlier generation, the dying Boston Brahmins of Beacon Hill. But that Back Bay pride and self-assurance is what Marquand himself was always reaching...
...popular writer, a Harvard graduate, reacting against the decadence and futile ancestor worship of his tumble-down New England family. And if the hero had the unmistakable air of the author himself-the pipe-smoking, tweedy, dressed-by-Brooks-Brothers blueblood-the hero's family was also unquestionably Marquand...