Word: novel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...poll of the world's literary critics, Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann would probably win the nomination as the greatest living novelist. He would not, however, win any prizes as the most read-or most readable. His ninth and latest novel, Dr. Faustus, is probably his most difficult. A November co-choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club,* Dr. Faustus is a challenge to the club's membership, who will find it a chewy mouthful after some of the literary pap they have been fed recently...
This is Somerset Maugham's 22nd novel. He has announced that it is also to be his last. If he sticks to that, 74-year-old Author Maugham, England's most popular contemporary novelist, will have brought to an end a career that has included such lasting favorites as Of Human Bondage, Cakes & Ale, and The Moon and Sixpence, as well as 57 volumes of short stories, essays, travel books and plays...
...German editions, Stalingrad has sold more than a million copies. It is not likely to make such a dent in the U.S., because it is directed to the Germans. It calls itself a novel-but, in essence, it is not a novel at all; it is an enormous chart of case histories in a world of mass horror...
...last novel is as simple and unpretentious as anything he has ever written. Catalina is no masterpiece; it is merely a disarming little story laid in Spain during the Inquisition and written in a grave and effortless style modeled on the old chronicles, and sometimes edging over into a bland and amusing parody of them. The story concerns an extraordinary occurrence in the town of Castel Rodriguez: a girl named Catalina Perez, comely, virtuous and 16 years old, who has been trampled by a bull and crippled so that she can walk only with a crutch, reports that the Virgin...
Portrait of Humility. Unexpectedly, however, this shrewd and seasoned work is very nearly a first-rate novel. It becomes so, not by virtue of Maugham's mastery of form, great as it is, or his humor, of which too much has been made, nor his skepticism, which sometimes grows wearisome. It is distinguished for its portrait of Bishop Blasco de Valero. The devout prelate, self-sacrificing, presiding with terrible humility and conscientiousness over the trials of heretics, is a masterly portrait, equal to Maugham's best, and belonging well up in the gallery of modern fiction...