Word: novelistic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Volume I of Norman Sherry's meticulously protracted biography takes the English novelist step by step, from his birth in 1904 to 1939. Readers of Greene's memoir A Sort of Life may experience a mild paramnesia as they again hear of the novelist's neurotic childhood, his crush on his psychoanalyst's wife, his dissolute years at Oxford, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his beginnings as a journalist, and the physical and spiritual wanderings that led to the writing of his popular moral thrillers...
...novelist selected Sherry for the job after reading his 1971 book on Joseph Conrad, Conrad's Western World. Greene was taken with the scholar's unbiased approach and willingness to travel to the remote and hazardous regions that inspired the author of The Heart of Darkness. And indeed, Sherry makes a fuss about his field investigations for this book: "Risking disease and death as he had done, I went to those places and in most cases found people Greene had met and put into his novels." He tells us that he developed gangrene in South America and got dysentery...
...with Greeks that the delegation to Dean Epps brought to mind, the current issue of Outlook reminds of the exciting intellectual activity among a group of Harvard Black students during my early teaching days in the 1960s. A group of Black students (among them Ayee Queh Armah, now a novelist; Lee Daniels, now a New York Times correspondent, and Robert Hall, now a college professor) came up with the idea to found a journal--The Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs--and I and Archie Epps, then an assistant dean of freshmen, joined them as advisors, which meant mainly running ourselves...
Louis Auchincloss, discreet attorney to the well-to-do and subtle novelist of their mores, proposes that the period between 1880 and 1910 could be called the Vanderbilt Era, after its largest and wealthiest clan. In these portraits in miniature of family members -- plus outriders like Richard Morris Hunt, who designed their grandiose homes -- Auchincloss writes with the relaxed intimacy of a frequent houseguest. (In fact, his wife Adele is a Vanderbilt descendant...
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Kennan is imprisoned by the Nazis. Released, he goes on to serve in Portugal, London and then, as the war winds down, the Soviet Union. In the early days, the writer regards the country less as a diplomat than as a romantic novelist manque. Leningrad is "one of the most poignant communities of the world . . . I know that in this city, where I have never lived, there had nevertheless been deposited by some strange quirk of fate -- a previous life, perhaps? -- a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love...