Word: novelistic
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David Plimpton, a New York psychologist, was Irving's school sparring partner 20 years ago. He recalls the future novelist as highly competitive and tenacious. Says Plimpton: "He had a very good side-leg takedown. On top he could ride about anything. He was a real urban cowboy...
...competition too stiff. After a dispiriting year, he left for the University of New Hampshire at Durham, only ten miles from Exeter. "I felt that I had not got anywhere," he says. In fact, he had come to the right place. The English faculty included a young Southern novelist named John Yount (Wolf at the Door, The Trapper's Last Shot), who told the restless student with the broad shoulders and burning brown eyes what he wanted to hear. "It was so simple," Irving remembers. " Yount was the first person to point out to me that anything...
...drama. Perhaps that is the reason why his characters continue to haunt contemporary fiction and film, and scholars keep expanding the Conrad industry. Frederick Karl's monumental but plodding 1979 biography now holds the record for sheer size at 1,008 pages. A new book by the novelist's son John, Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered (Cambridge University Press), offers filial recollections and depicts the writer as a martinet, trying mightily to overcome his natural reserve, able to show his family little open affection, and perpetually striving for a financial security that was always just beyond reach...
...novelist, who saw himself as "Pole, Catholic and Gentleman," left his native country at age 16. Between then and the age of 40, he voyaged all over the world, soaking up South American background for stories like Nostromo and Caspar Ruiz, working on sailing ships, where his experiences served as the basis for The Nigger of the Narcissus. He joined a steamship expedition up the Congo, which became the setting for Heart of Darkness. The circumstances of his life would seem to require little exaggeration, but Conrad loved to romanticize everything, including himself. As Tennant shows, he probably never...
...casts its deepest shadow on those who stand next to it. That is Playwright Furth's proposition in this crackling light comedy. In a belated bid for personal visibility, Ellen (Hope Lange) has written an intimately detailed roman à clef profiling her Pulitzer-prize winning (Presidents and Precedents) novelist husband and a quartet of her best friends...