Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...credits, including a couple of horror movies and the soap opera Dark Shadows, they felt sure that he had the passion, talent and physical stamina for the job. Wouk was put off by Curtis' record. Only after Paramount sent him two nonhorrific Curtis TV specials did the novelist agree to see him. "He came to my home, but he wasn't wearing the bar mitzvah suit I figured a producer would wear upon meeting the author," says Wouk. "I open the door, and there stands this man in black slacks, black shirt, a gold chain, curly black hair...
...were a match for her formidable perceptions. The pity was, went the critical chorus, that she wasted her talent on such trivial themes and frivolous characters. That argument reflected the reverse snobbism of intellectuals who were unwilling to grant that the rich and the worldly were worthy of a novelist's attention, as if there had been no Proust. Sagan defended herself: "I have always made my characters belong to the same social group, out of decency. I've never known poverty; I don't see why I should try to make a living talking about social...
Writers, artists and beauties flit through Quennell's pages like guests at one of Lady Ottoline Morrell's parties. Here is George Orwell, with his face of "haggard nobility"; Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, "clever, sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned, close-lipped"; and Rose Macaulay, telling a friend at the end of her life, "I think I'm going to die in a fortnight. When are you pushing off?" Quennell writes affectionately of Artist Augustus John, with his gypsy ways and tribe of illegitimate children; John was immensely popular in his heyday, yet "had nothing of the fatuous outward...
...unexplainable as an Ahab. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, her most recent novel, uses an eatery as a metaphor for family life, in which food is the stuff of history, and patrons are constantly eating and running away. The wife of an Iranian child psychiatrist who is also a novelist, Tyler still bristles at being described as "a mother of two." Says she: "For me, writing was the only way out. Is John Updike a father of four who writes...
...Novelist Gail Godwin, 45, has taken up the theme of self-sufficient women with passion and precision. In four earlier works she offered that rarest literary character, the female rogue. This time, in A Mother and Two Daughters, her first bestseller, she soars through nearly 600 pages to modernize the message of Jane Eyre: would-be Rochesters stand back and let the heroines manage the estates. Godwin's women face their trials with refreshing distance, like the author. When a female interviewer asked, "Why do you feel a need to modulate suffering with sweet reasonableness and humor?" the author...