Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...April 26, 1968, cover story, TIME said of Novelist John Updike, then 36 and author of the just published Couples: "He has ignored the mainstream of contemporary Western fiction. Nearly every important American writer works from an assumption that society is at best malevolent and stupid, at worst wholly lunatic. Updike dares to hope for both the reality of God and the sanity of society. "This week, 14 years, 14 books and many prestigious literary awards later, TIME once again has chosen Updike as its cover subject. Only four other novelists have appeared twice on TIME'S covers: Sinclair...
Neither the author's older self nor anyone else has mounted a convincing challenge. Updike belongs to the minority that takes his serious poetry seriously. As for the rest, he has his peers, perhaps betters, as a novelist, belletrist, essayist and short-story writer, but they are different people in each case. Updike's versatility has been achieved at some cost. The rules governing his work have remained consistent and deliberately circumscribed. Wit dominates passion; irony mocks the possibility of tragic grandeur. The feelings most likely to seize Updike's comfortably situated people are nostalgia and lust...
Social life includes some entertaining at home ("My wife is a good cook") and evenings out with friends in Boston, members of a literary set that includes Biographer Justin Kaplan and his wife, the novelist Anne Bernays. Throughout his career, Updike has chosen to live in snug corners, well away from the intrigues, gossip and power struggles that invariably ensue when the literati mingle...
...powerlessness to resist an apocalyptic event may be exceeded by only one worse form of suffering: the inability to explain it. Elie Wiesel, sent to Auschwitz as a boy, has spent a lifetime examining and re-examining the Holocaust as historian, novelist and theologian. Three years ago, after revisiting Auschwitz, he confessed, "I understand it less and less...
...most splendid hopes, will attend, and so will Robert Harrison, a black from my home town, Yazoo City, who has just become president of Mississippi's board of trustees for institutions of higher learning. The keynote speaker will be Margaret Walker Alexander, the black novelist and teacher. Meredith, now a businessman in Jackson, has been invited to speak...