Word: novels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, told the story: Hemingway suffered blood poisoning in February from a fragment of shotgun wadding that lodged in his eye while he was shooting wild fowl in Italy. Doctors gave him a short time to live. Feeling that he could not finish the novel "of large proportions" that he had been working on for years, he started writing a new one, went right on with it after throwing off his illness. The 300-page book's subject: World War II. Its title: still unchosen...
...fourth book Lowry has now written the story that most American novelists write first, the autobiographical novel. The Big Cage is the account of the education, boyhood, family life, first writings and first loves of a writer. It is the recurrent theme of recent American literature, the story of Look Homeward, Angel, of Moon-Calf, A World I Never Made, The Genius, This Side of Paradise and innumerable other tales of sensitive, gifted and egocentric youth at war with the narrow constraints of American culture...
...still not master of the novel and his characters have a foursquare, surface rightness rather than depth. He can also use some unashamed, sugary, overripe prose: "And it came on toward night, and the sun was down and the fire of its setting dead, and the coyotes were beginning to yip on the hills and the stars to light up, and there was the good smell of aspen smoke in his nose." But most readers will be thankful for a fictional fidelity to time & place that is wholly exceptional among Guthrie's competitors...
...Ludi, his last and his greatest book, is not likely to make Hesse popular with them, but it will at least serve to give them an idea of what his dry, remote, ironic and highly individual writing amounts to. Hesse was born in Germany 72 years ago, wrote autobiographical novels and lyric poetry in his youth-he is considered one of the best German lyric poets since the age of Goethe -became a Swiss citizen during World War I in protest against German militarism. He traveled in India, wrote a volume on Hindu mysticism in his middle years, published...
...Kicked Butch? With these fairly familiar ingredients, Robert Molloy (Pride's Way) has apparently set out to write a novel that would be to a Manhattan boyhood what A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is to girlhood on the other side of the East River. All the embarrassments and humiliations of adolescence are here, with perhaps a few more than is customary: the pimples, the first long pants, the first dates, the first fights, the first sexual experiences, and the earnest attempts, quickly thwarted, to become a football star...