Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lewis Wallace failed in four schools in four years, started his first novel at the age of 16, and then (in 1843) ran away to join the Texas navy, only to be brought home again. His father a West Point graduate and onetime governor of Indiana, said to him: "I am sorry, disappointed, mortified; so, without shutting the door upon you, I am resolved that from today you must go out and earn your own livelihood. I shall watch your course hopefully...
...like a departing storm cloud, high above the year's fiction. One of the better pieces of writing about it was Allen R. Matthews' The Assault, a terse account of hitting the beach at Iwo Jima. Worth reading were John Home Burns's The Gallery, a novel of a G.I.'s experiences in Naples, Charles Christian Wertenbaker's story of the French Forces of the Interior (Write Sorrow on the Earth), Godfrey Blunden's novel of Moscow and Muscovites in their grim winters of war and political despair (A Room on the Route). William...
...always, commercial fiction writers hammered out their fables according to formula, exploiting the daydreams of the young ("This girl might have been YOU") and the complacencies of the self-deceived. Sexual pandering in the form of the novel had its usual quota of professional and amateur practitioners. As always, however, a few hundred young men & women, fascinated by the charms of art and the oddities of real experience, tried to write honestly and well...
Among the few U.S. novels that did not suffer from paucity of style as well as poverty of theme was Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion, a funny and tragic little story of children in the West. Another was Bend Sinister, Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant nightmare novel of European life at the advent of dictatorship. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, an ambitious effort to analyze a modern type of disintegrated personality and to make it universal, failed in the second aim; but his descriptions of a Mexican setting were memorable. The finest short stories...
...Whitman; Edmund Wilson's jarringly narrow-minded Europe Without Baedeker; Lloyd Morris' genre pieces in Postscript to Yesterday. Welcome relief from the weedlike academicism that is choking American criticism were V. S. Pritchett's urbane, pleasant but acute essays on English writers in The Living Novel...