Word: novels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Nobody wrote the "Great War Novel" that everybody has taken for granted ever since V-day. But a few writers did try to record their personal experiences, particularly young (25) Norman Mailer, a Pacific veteran whose The Naked and The Dead, a rugged, stormy first novel, whirled straight to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there. Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions also made a great splash, though with far less literary justification...
Appreciated but less popular were John Cobb's* scrutiny of U.S.A.A.F. men & manners in wartime England, The Gesture (also a first novel), James Gould Cozzens' Guard of Honor, an admirable study of base life at a U.S. flying field, and Theodor Plievier's gruesome Stalingrad, a broad-scale battle picture whose forceful "documentary" slant made it more fact than fiction...
Unsuccessful Hunting. Nobody harpooned the even more mythical white whale known as the "Great American Novel." Indiana's Ross Lockridge (who later committed suicide) made a stab at it; he brought home a huge, Ulysses-like animal named Raintree County, which was hailed by critics as a monumental attempt and then floated away in an embarrassed silence. Silence was the kindest treatment of Remembrance Rock, Carl Sandburg's large, muddled, impassioned effort to learn lessons for the future from a study of the American past...
...which, under a cunning mythological disguise, a talented former disciple of Hitler had denounced the Führer and all his works. In World Without Visa, a story of Marseille under the Vichy regime, France's Jean Malaquais wrote. perhaps the year's best political novel...
...cream of the novels from the Continent was unquestionably Albert Camus' The Plague, a study of 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...