Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Voluntary Exiles. Some Negro artists have done impressively well. Writer Chester Himes, 49, from Jefferson City, Mo., last week won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for his novel, La Reine des Pommes, a roman noir or dark-toned crime story that was hailed by Author Jean Giono as "the most extraordinary novel I have read in a long time," and praised by Jean Cocteau as "a prodigious masterpiece." Sculptor Harold Cousins, from Washington, D.C., has lived nine years in Paris, sold a sculpture last month to the Claude Bernard Gallery, and has been commissioned...
Welcome Home. Richard Gibson, in Manhattan from Paris for the publication of his new novel, A Mirror for Magistrates, points out that other Negro writers (Ralph Ellison, William Demby, Ben Johnson) have chosen Rome for their voluntary exile. He says: "All these people are in Europe because of social and political causes which everyone knows. The bright young white boys, after the end of their Fulbright scholarships, are able to return with reasonably light hearts to the dens of Madison Avenue or to the provincial Ph.D. factories. It is still impossible for an American Negro to return to the land...
...Rules. When Stalin died, Pasternak wrote his novel Doctor Zhivago out of a passionate Christian conviction that salvation is possible only through the individual human spirit. He had shown that spirit in conflict with Soviet society, against which he had sharp things to say -but he had not written merely a political tract. Yet his message undercut the whole dogma of the socialist panacea, as Pasternak's Moscow editors worriedly said in their surprisingly mild 1956 letter of rejection, which was made public in Russia last fortnight...
...Artist's Fable. Without ever repudiating Doctor Zhivago-which, he repeated, had been published abroad without his authority-Pasternak expressed only regrets at the way in which some had interpreted it. "After the end of the week, when I saw the scope of the political campaign around my novel, I realized myself that this award was a political measure." His Soviet editors, wrote Pasternak, "warned me that the novel might be understood as a work directed against the October Revolution and the founders of the Soviet system. I did not realize this, and I now regret...
...great novel that won its author the Nobel Prize. Both an indictment of Communist inhumanity and a moving hymn to the Russian people's humanity...