Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...then a first-rank U.S. literary hero. Leftish intellectuals and young people distressed by the depression saw his massive and radical trilogy, U.S.A., as a powerful plea for America's underprivileged. Written at a time when social novelists were likely to have more anger than talent, U.S.A. was a major literary achievement. Perhaps for the first time, an American novelist chose society as a whole as his central figure and used individual characters as mere illustrations for his thesis that America had been skidding downhill, socially and morally, since World...
...last third of An Act of Love is a first-rate, exciting war report. Correspondent Wolfert can describe a battle in its coherent entirety while focusing attention on a few men fighting in it. But as a novelist, he cannot bring to life the feelings of men in war with the same vividness that he brings a battle to life. Towards his sad weakling of a hero, whom Wolfert tiresomely philosophizes over, the reader can feel only the sort of minor pity one feels for a sick puppy...
...longer a novelist, but he is everything else-a critic who writes a knowing account of royal mistresses, an avid traveler whose "escapes" abroad produce delightful travelogues, a father who often yearns for solitude. He is also drinking more than he used to, as a result of his failure as a novelist, but he is raising his standard of living as a result of his popular "success." In short, he is a dead duck...
...Novelist James Norman Hall (Mutiny on the Bounty), who also flew for the Escadrille...
...human behavior in the face of death,-Readers might justly disdain the gabby slickness of The Chips Are Down, Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist novel; but in Camus (often regarded as one of existentialism's fellow travelers, though he denies it), they could recognize the true novelist's capacity for translating philosophy and faith into the vigorous language of human conduct...