Word: novel
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Surprise shivered the book world last week, when the winner of the annual $1,000 (plus publicity) Pulitzer Prize for the best novel of 1928 was unofficially revealed to be a novel called Victim and Victor, by a man named John Rathbone Oliver. Wise literary prophets had been forecasting winners and raising authorial hopes, but none had mentioned Victim and Victor. It was a literary dark horse blacker than night...
...sudden rise to publicity of Victim and Victor caught the book trade unaware. Clerks went scurrying around looking under counters to see if they had any in stock. The novel was published last December by the Religious Book Department of Macmillan Co. It was reviewed in due course. Here and there a big-time reviewer was favorable but there was no concerted beating of the tomtoms such as heralds a volume bound for success of esteem and money...
Without tumult and tomtoms, Author Oliver has had literary success before now. His novel Fear, published two years ago. also by Macmillan's Religious Book Department, has achieved eleven printings. Victim and Victor has had one large printing since December. Both are on the same general theme: the healing power, spiritual, mental, physical, that may lie in the co-operative work of an understanding physician and an intelligent minister. The hero of Victim and Victor is a priest unfrocked for drunkenness. Author Oliver, a Doctor, was an unfrocked minister from 1923 to 1927, is now practising psychiatry and criminology...
...frameworks of nice prose such swift tumultuous stories as Jane, Our Stranger and Flamingo. But none of her past work presaged the ambitious conception, the flights of rhetoric displayed in her present work, which is the story of Evolution reduced to the limits of the popular novel. Jehovah's "day," a million years in human reckoning, dawns with Eryops, fat and repulsive Mud Puppy who dragged himself from primordial slime; ends with Peregrine, fat and lovable scientist who rose to planes of pure intellect, and his wife Ann who reached for realms of pure spirit only to be dragged...
Publisher Friede (see above) rushed from Boston to Manhattan to appear before a Court of Special Sessions. There his company's novel, The Well of Loneliness by Authoress Radclyffe Hall of England, was being attacked by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Three judges decided this book was not obscene. The book's theme: Lesbianism...