Word: novelist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Novelist Somerset Maugham, visiting friends in San Francisco to celebrate his 75th birthday, had something pleasant to remember. "The nicest compliment ever paid me," he announced, "was a letter from a G.I. in the Pacific during the war, who wrote me that he had read an entire story of mine without having to look up a single word in the dictionary...
...emotional sock is in the bit parts of the men who flew missions, well played by John Hodiak, Cameron Mitchell, Marshall Thompson and Michael Steele. Like the play and the book before it, the movie makes out a sympathetic case for the desk-bound generals and echoes Novelist-War Correspondent Ernest Hemingway's observation that generals are good people...
Triumph of Kinship. Author Elias, a member of the Cornell English department, got most of the fresh material for his book from Dreiser himself between 1937 and the novelist's death in 1945. Since this was the case, it is disappointing that the book does not go into greater detail on Dreiser's political activities, his adherence to Communism before his death, or into the bumbling and fumbling of the writing of his later years. The deeper loss that his approach involves is the loss of emotion that would give meaning to the facts so carefully presented...
Dreiser wrote out of a body of experience more highly charged than that of any American novelist of his time, and the triumph of his career was that he was able to stand off from the world in which Sister Carrie lived, while still remaining a part of it. His comprehension of its dullness and its misery never destroyed his sense of human kinship with the people to whom it was the norm of life...
Readers who find false beards passe may as well pass up The Dukays, even though the publishers are boosting it as their "major book for the spring of 1949," and Author Lajos Zilahy as "Hungary's foremost novelist." The Dukays was a Hungarian bestseller in 1947; probably nothing but a popular revolt against tinsel fiction can stop it from being equally successful...