Word: novel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...contribution to modern U.S. politics is the somewhat novel discovery that good government does not necessarily depend on good party politics. As a candidate for governor of California in 1946 he won an unprecedented renomination on both Democratic and Republican tickets, promptly appointed men of both parties to state office. To some party regulars, such action was close to party treason. To Warren, it meant a rise in his popularity...
...book important enough to be smuggled out of Italy in a diplomatic pouch. When Persons and Places was published in the U.S. in 1944, it became the second book of Philosopher George Santayana to win the popular accolade of the Book-of-the-Month Club (the first: his only novel, The Last Puritan). Readers who couldn't be bribed to look at a book of philosophy were beguiled by a style so urbane and a wit so civilized as to make even the cloistered life of a Harvard professor (Santayana taught there from 1889 to 1912) seem freighted with...
...first glance, Fire in the Morning is one more novel about little foxes-post-bellum Southern variety. Years back, old Daniel Armstrong (of the hardy and gallant Armstrongs) had been cheated out of a large inheritance of land by Simon Gerrard (of the grasping, industrious Gerrards). One family blights the land with its deceit and vulgarity; the other hopelessly defends the old code...
Miss Spencer handles this theme with genuine skill. The things this young writer can do with the novel form are astonishing. But all too often she writes like a bright student mimicking the best models. She is especially irritating when she adopts the frenzied style of the sort of "woman novelist" who worries her subject and prose to death by merely vibrating portentously when she should be letting her narrative move along. If Elizabeth Spencer, a writer of large and natural talents, can find her own voice, she may develop into an important American novelist...
...young Yale professor had an immediate success with a first novel, The Asiatics. Frederic Prokosch had written a story so flamboyantly adventurous and so rich in pure writing talent that to carp at its philosophical maunderings seemed petty. Wrote Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann: "I count it among the most brilliant and original achievements of the young literary generation." The trouble is that Prokosch has gone on writing variants of the same book for 13 years. His latest is Storm and Echo, like The Asiatics, a blend of far places, strange and terrible events, and a murky, anguished, generally unsuccessful search...