Word: mountain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...matters of locale and decoration, careful to avoid subverting the circumstances of poverty into sentimentality. The Luther kids-all played by nonprofessional actors-live in a cabin wallpapered with newspaper, which also serves from time to time as a residence for a pet pig and a cow. The surrounding mountain country has a lavish beauty, on which the Luther cabin is a canker...
This sort of dilution has its source in the script by Earl Hamner Jr., creator of television's The Waltons, a soft cow-eyed evocation of the Depression struggles of another Southern mountain family. Like John-Boy Walton, Mary Call wants to be a writer, and Hamner supplies reveries for her ("Lately I've begun to feel a bottomless fright") that have much less adolescent intensity than a kind of brilliantined adult sentimentality. Where the Lilies Bloom was made as a G-rated family movie, which is the probable reason- though hardly a good excuse- for avoiding...
Have effete Eastern intellectuals underestimated this whoop-it-up Westerner who often behaved, as his biographer admits, like "the illegitimate offspring of H.L. Mencken and Annie Oakley"? Wallace Stegner, novelist (The Big Rock Candy Mountain), Stanford professor, and a fellow native of Utah, concedes that DeVoto was often wrong as well as "spectacularly right." He was also an 'Implacable showoff" who "set world records for taking himself seriously." But yes, says Stegner, DeVoto has been low-rated, chiefly because he ran with no coterie, and in fact ran head down against most of the opinion makers...
...Nickel Mountain, Gardner...
...come unrelenting to take away all the unattached grains of snow. The boilerplate ice and roots and rocks are uncovered and the sugarbowl give way to something desolate. In seasons as short of snow as recent ones, what little snow there is never quite gets a purchase on the mountain, and blows off into the valleys and trees. Who knows where it goes really? Where does a frustrated spirit sweep away the magic white dust? Why does that spirit return to the mountain...