Word: novelist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Toward the end of her life, British Novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980) defined the "immortality most authors would want -- to feel that their work would be immediately recognisable as having been written by them and by nobody else. But of course, it's a lot to ask for!" Her extravagant request was answered. In this last collection -- all or parts of four unpublished novels, plus four stories and a radio talk -- the unmistakable Pym piquancy is everywhere. It mocks a self-centered woman in the 1940s as she awakens: "Something unpleasant had happened. And then she remembered...
Judith Hearne took up permanent residence in the literary world's case load in 1955 when Novelist Brian Moore anatomized her "lonely passion." In Peter Nelson's screenplay, however, she is more a curio than a figure of powerful emotional relevance. This classic spinster (to whose portrayal Maggie Smith brings all the right moves but nothing very individual) is a Dublin piano teacher. Naturally she drinks a bit. Sometimes she drinks a lot. Her timorous gentility suggests to her landlady's brother (Bob Hoskins, with some of his spark plugs missing) the possibilities of untapped wealth -- enough of it, anyway...
Guess what? Things didn't work out quite that way. Allen, identified as "Mr. Alien," does deadpan a bit of Shakespeare's text. Mailer and his daughter Kate do appear briefly, but the novelist indulged in a "ceremony of star behavior" and left town. So Godard vamped. He hired Burgess Meredith to play a gang-lord Lear (with many Mailer intonations) and Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. And he turned the film into a cynical, pun-laden, nonlinear meditation on virtue vs. power...
...take the Iowa caucus as an accurate measure more seriously than the New Hampshire primary," insists Writer Madson. Its political system is almost free of corruption. Its kids always score among the top on national exams. "The accident of the caucuses in Iowa is a happy accident," declares Novelist Frank Conroy, a transplanted Easterner...
Ambition and false identity, suicide and posthumous fame: these are the ingredients of high romance, and it is no wonder that investigators periodically ransack the material of Chatterton's brief career. The latest is Briton Peter Ackroyd, 38, biographer of T.S. Eliot and a novelist who specializes in the blending of history and imagination. In Hawksmoor he shuttled between the 18th century and the present. Chatterton ventures deeper ! into the time warp. It unfolds in contemporary England, concludes in the late 1700s and dallies in the Victorian epoch when an artist named Henry Wallis painted a dramatic portrait...