Word: novel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...thrash the cad with a riding crop. Like a sensible novelist, he gently escorted the lady to his house in Harley Street (where she was to live as his mistress for many years) and made haste to turn their fortunate meeting into Chapter I of his next novel, The Woman in White. This novel, and its thrilling successor, The Moonstone, made Wilkie Collins one of Victorian England's richest and most popular writers...
...traces a clear outline of a dark Scandinavian story. The fearless Pastor of Vejlby, Soren Qvist, prayed God to relieve him of the passion of anger. But when the insolent Morten Bruus asked for his only daughter in marriage, Soren hurled him to the ground. The title of the novel refers not only to the actual trial of the Pastor for murder, with which he was eventually charged, but to the spiritual ordeal that preceded...
John Marquand's sly satire of Bostonism takes still another dilution of commercialism in the film adaptation of a play that was a good novel. Progressively each of the interested parties have taken Marquand's Apley and twisted him into an inscrutable New England patriarch (the play) and now into a harmless old crone whose inner conflict is no greater than the woes of a lovelorn son and daughter. Not only is George Apley altered to fit the needs of non-New England audiences, but the aura of Beacon Hill and Louisburg Square is wrenched out of reality and transformed...
...trouble is that Boston (or any other place) just couldn't be as nit-witted as MGM's version of it. All of the sure fire of conflict that forces the Apley of the novel to reexamine his life every time he brushes against the non-Boston world--is telescoped into two dozen or so scenes that are very inadequate. One by one the facets of Apley's life are given five-minute treatment until he becomes a predictable, uncomplicated incompetent who can be counted on for the wrong decision, or at least a carefully articulated Malapropism...
Author Shute has projected a heavyweight plea in a lightweight novel. The plot is embarrassingly slight: wounded Veteran John Turner, back at his job as a London salesman, is told by his surgeon that he has but a year to live. He is determined, before he dies, to look up three hospital buddies who were kind to him: a British pilot, a British paratrooper, an American Negro G.I. In Burma, he finds the pilot (who had once objected to having the Negro in the same hospital room), happily married to a Burmese girl. The paratrooper (who had beaten a murder...