Word: novels
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Grapes of Wrath is the Oakies' saga. It is John Ernst Steinbeck's longest novel (619 pages) and more ambitious than all his others combined (Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, et al.). The publishers believe it is "perhaps the greatest modern American novel, perhaps the greatest single creative work this country has ever produced." It is not. But it is Steinbeck's best novel, i.e., his toughest and tenderest, his roughest written and most mellifluous, his most realistic and, in its ending, his most melodramatic, his angriest and most idyllic. It is "great...
...chapters Author Steinbeck speaks directly to the reader in panoramic essays on the social significance of the Oakies' story. Burning tracts in themselves, they are not a successful fiction experiment. In them a "social awareness" outruns artistic skill. Steinbeck is a writer, still, of great promise. But this novel's big audience of readers will likely find in it one of the most impassioned and exciting books of the year...
During his "exile" in the U. S. (he returned to Paris two months ago), Elliot Paul wrote a novel, Concert Pitch, and spent much time studying U. S. labor. The result is The Stars and Stripes Forever. A strike novel laid in a one-man manufacturing town in Connecticut, it contains no Communist character, goes light on leftist propaganda. Conceit rather than the C.I.O. accounts for the fact that the villain, Tycoon Loring, finally gets the whole town down on him, including the high school football team. With its neat plot and smooth dialogue, The Stars and Stripes Forever...
This is the precocious first novel of a precocious bricklayer. Born 28 years ago in the slums of West Hoboken, N. J., handsome Pietro di Donato was 14 when his father was killed in a construction accident, leaving a widow and eight children. Pietro, a "bricklayer in diapers," took up his father's bricklaying trowel, has supported his family ever since. In his off-hours he read everything in sight, especially Russian novels...
Theme of this gracefully padded first novel: intellectuals are hawks, plain citizens are sparrows. Intellectual Kipter, a bearded, philosophical, moulting bird, goes to board in a nest of lower-middle-class sparrows: a voluptuous ex-chorus girl and her 17-year-old niece. Fascinated, the female sparrows twitter around his bedroom, while Kipter pays them cautious compliments. Blamed for fouling the nest when he merely pushes the landlady out to protect his virtue, the hawk makes a back-window exit just in time to save his tail feathers. Hawk Among the Sparrows is less a warning to high-flying intellectuals...