Word: merriday
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...chose the review of Sinclair Lewis' latest book, Bethel Merriday, from the March 25 TIME. When we came to class the next day with our assignments we told the name of the book selected, the reviewer, and the magazine from which it was taken...
...Bethel Merriday is a distinctly better book, and its comparative goodness may be instructive to historians of Sinclair Lewis' career. With a talent that has more hop on the ball than nine or ten ordinary writers, Lewis wrote his memorable novels not when he had a "good idea" but when parts of the U. S. social scene stirred him to sardonic, passionate-and first-hand-study. Arrowsmith is a classic example, and it is with Arrowsmith that Bethel Merriday may be fairly compared...
...feminine lead in Bethel Merriday is an earnest small girl from a middle-class New England household who takes college theatrics seriously, gets her pa to shell out $425 for ten weeks of apprenticeship at an arty summer theatre. The old Lewis ear for idiom goes to work on airy Director Roscoe Valentine ("So beautifully fallible!"); the old Lewis Saturday Evening Post touch appears in godlike, athletic Andy Deacon, Yale and Newport, amateur actor and angel to the company. Bethel Merriday learns the talk, the tricks, the hard-working realities of acting. She would agree with her creator that...
...supporting cast Lewis lavishes his gift for satiric characterization and incident as the troupe journeys from one-night stand to one-night stand in the Midwest, as the blizzards blow, the fevers rise and the tempers explode one by one. By the time the show goes bust Bethel Merriday has proved herself a dependable actress, has fallen out of love with Andy, in love with a fiercer young actor from whose pillow she rises to make the coffee as ... the . . . curtain . . . falls...
...note that Sinclair Lewis' mellowness sometimes goes maudlin, that his asides on the renaissance of the stage through college and summer theatre companies are more enthusiastic than thoughtful, that about half his characters are themselves straight out of stock, and that as a novel the education of Bethel Merriday is neither so close-knit nor so serious in import as was that of Martin Arrowsmith. But the reader must likewise note that this is not the sour and rickety work of an old self-imitator but a buoyant tale with neither claims nor pretensions to being a profound work...