Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DEATH REVEALED. James Gould Cozzens, 74. successful, cerebral American novelist whose Guard of Honor, the story of a young World War II general faced with a problem of racial discrimination, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949; of pneumonia; on Aug. 9, in Stuart, Fla. After his first novel, Confusion, was published, Cozzens dropped out of Harvard, wrote one more novel, then married a New York literary agent and settled into a life of seclusion and unremitting hard work. In the 13 books that followed he fashioned a stark vision of life, and sometimes a clinical view of love, against meticulously...
...desks. June 15, 1978, was a day for executive field rations. Since 9:30 a.m. Webb's ear had been grafted to her telephone, accepting bids for what ended as the most expensive paperback auction in publishing history: $2.2 million for the rights to reprint Mario Puzo's new novel, Fools Die, plus $350,000 to reprint his alltime bestselling saga, The Godfather. The previous record price, $1.9 million, was paid for Colleen McCullough's Australian sheep opera, The Thorn Birds, now playing beach blankets and jammed airline lounges throughout the free-time world...
...Puzo package, Koster was chasing rights to publish works by Franz Kafka. She was outbid by Pocket Books, who paid $210,000. The Prague pension clerk would have been fascinated by the rituals of a modern paperback auction. He had envisioned the adrenal new world in his novel Amerika. But could he have imagined that he would be in six figures...
...before high-powered auctions, hard-cover houses would circulate manuscripts to their friends in the paperback business. Back would come sealed bids, with the rights going to the highest offer in a one-round competition. In 1957, for example, Fawcett paid $100,000 for rights to James Gould Cozzens' novel of emotional middle-age spread, By Love Possessed. Four years later the same house paid $400,000 for William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich...
...because that behavior offends convention but because it endangers survival. Merlyn's warning to a promiscuous actress about the dangers of V.D. echoes an Army training film, though the reader may not be sure whether the author is trying to be funny or just didactic. The novel's biggest flaw is a switching back and forth from third-to first-person narrative, thus violating Puzo's own first rule of writing...