Word: old
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...anyone born after World War I, Ruth Suckow's new novel may seem no more contemporary than an old-fashioned Sunday sermon, no closer to modern literature than Horatio Alger. It may be hard to believe that she was once praised as a realist, and that so joyous a literary scalper as Henry Louis Mencken cheered her on and gave her houseroom in his American Mercury. The fact is, Author Suckow has not changed at all, but life has. The Iowa that was her childhood home is still the source of her fictional truth. In The John Wood Case...
...town of some 2,000 people. He is handsome beyond compare, a superintendent of the Sunday school, and gives the devotion of a medieval knight to his chronically sick wife. His son Philip is a senior in high school and is, if anything, a cut above the old block-handsome, kind, courteous, his mother's protector, his school's hero and his minister's pride. Even old Colonel Merriam, his father's boss, sees the boy's virtues, and it seems not unlikely that Philip will cut through social barriers and marry the old...
...fact is that that best of fathers and husbands, John Wood, has been stealing the firm's money to speculate on the Chicago stock exchange. What interests Author Suckow is how the old Iowans she knew so well square the dreadful event with conscience, with character based on Biblical supports, with the responses of common humanity. Some, including old friends, are uncompromisingly unforgiving. Others, knowing that John Wood broke the code in the hope of easing life for his sick wife, want to be charitable. But for young Philip, life seems smashed, and his agony is the greater because...
...underestimate because they are so difficult to praise. Speaking softly on some quiet theme, they say little that is arresting, even when they are subtly telling all that is important. Russian Novelist Vera Panova is such a writer. Her subject: the day-to-day life of a six-year-old...
...folk songs. Jewish businessmen, leaving Rotarian lunches with their gentile colleagues, are offended by the sight of a shambling, stoop-shouldered old man with a Judaic beard and earlocks...