Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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WELL, IF IT ISN'T GRANNY IN TIGHTS, leered the London Daily Herald. LEGS, panted the Daily Mail. What excited Fleet Street was a novel slice of cheesecake: pert, serious Cinemactress Vivien Leigh, wife of Sir Laurence Olivier, and a grandmother at 45. Last week trim Lady Olivier slipped on a red satin bathing suit and black mesh stockings, made a slinky, twittery TV debut as Sabina, the talkative, never-say-die seductress-maid in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. Critical verdict: Vivien once more proved that good legs are a ho-hum show...
...worked with such authors as Marcel Ayme, Alfred Hayes and John Cheever. Random House's Haydn (past jobs: editor of Crown and Bobbs-Merrill) edits The American Scholar, the Phi Beta Kappa journal, teaches fiction writing at the New School for Social Research. He wrote several novels, notably The Time Is Noon (1948), a panoramic view of American life that included some acid sidelights on the publishing business. In one scene, an ambitious junior editor is building up an awful novel to please a top publisher ("who wore knickers to the office and had only Wall Street friends...
British Novelist Eric Linklater (Juan in America, Laxdale Hall) wore the kilt of the gallant Black Watch in World War I and has laughed in the face of reality ever since. His new novel, My Fathers and I, is an escape into the past. It is told by a degenerate descendant of proud ancestors who were greatly absurd but greatly revered. The narrator is Edward G. (for Gratiano) Vanbrugh, a seedily broke antique dealer in a shabby English provincial town. His principal stock, symbolically enough, was a menagerie of Staffordshire China figures-shepherdesses, sailors, heroes of the past...
...nobody, but he has a spiv's eye for survival, the derisive eloquence of a shameless man and the bogus kind of face that, as he suggests, would go well on a butler or a bishop. As Author Linklater tells it in his savagely comic novel, Vanbrugh spent a profitable war as a wingless wing commander in the R.A.F. and ends his career as a superior flunky in the household of a Texas aristocrat. Says he: "I see my destiny, I recognize my genius ... but England, I have not abandoned you. No more than Clive or Hastings, Raffles...
...Sound and the Fury. Hollywood has diligently soaped up William Faulkner's stained-honor novel, but the laundered version is also admirably starched with excellent acting by Joanne Woodward, Yul Brynner and Margaret Leighton...