Word: novelist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ambition and success seem simply to have departed from the American novel. In the novels of Hemingway almost no work is good work-or, much the same thing, manly work-unless it confronts danger; one is permitted to be a bullfighter, a fisherman, a soldier, and of course a novelist, but all other work is trivial. In the work of a more rounded novelist, Willa Cather ... success is admired, but only success in the past: the new men that have arisen to seize it are grubby, narrow, without vision, unlike the heroic pioneer generation with its integrity, honor, heroism. William...
...still unfocused and drifted around Europe, doing a little film acting in Vienna and Munich, visiting museums. After coming home, she returned the next year to Paris "to really study." On the boat she had an improbable involvement with the bitterly anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who, she says, wanted to marry her. ("Don't you know that fanatics, if they hate Jews, love to marry Jewish women?") It was from this trip that she came back fully determined to be a professional. Nevelson enrolled at the Art Students League, joined the Mexican muralist Diego...
...Novelist John Marquand called him the third best editor he had ever known, after George Horace Lorimer and Maxwell Perkins. William Faulkner, Rebecca West, Willa Cather and other major writers found him a staunch and generous companion. Marc Connelly and William Saroyan phoned him when they needed money. One of the few dissenters was Evelyn Waugh, who called him, with characteristic bile, "an emaciated Jew lately promoted within the Hearst organization from editing a weekly paper devoted to commercial chemistry...
FICTION. Neighbors by Thomas Berger. A surreal, slapstick comedy about life in exurbia. Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler. The literary life, the shenanigans of the rich and newly rich, the pains of middle age and the importance of family loyalties, by Canada's most engaging novelist. Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow. The author of Ragtime plays intricate and haunting blues variations on the American dream during the Great Depression. Italian Folktales, selected and retold by Italo Calvino. One of Italy's best novelists takes time out from his own fiction to become the Brothers Grimm...
...only, perhaps, by money. There is nothing more intimately involved with the American way of being a man than the ability to knock someone down with a fist, and the cachet of a prizefighter exceeds that of, say, a football or hockey player, or a soldier, or certainly a novelist. In a century of institutional mayhem on such a scale that not only motives but actual numbers are impossible to comprehend, the boxer is our Deerslayer, the last surviving synthesis of American violence and American aloneness. And whether the boxer deserves to be a hero, still there is no denying...