Word: penrods
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Vitus-like nervous disorders; improved, went to college at Princeton. He returned to live in Indiana, started out as an illustrator. Failing at that he wrote for eight years: his gross returns were $22.50. The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) gave him his start. Penrod (1914) kept him going strong. Now one of the most popular American authors (The Magnificent...
Amber sons, Alice Adams won the 1919, 1922 Pulitzer prizes), he winters in Indianapolis, summers at Kennebunkport, Me., in a home well-known as "the house that Penrod built." About 1917 he began to go blind; in August, 1930 he became completely so. Now at last, after eight eye operations. Author Tarkington is able to see again the faces of the American types he knows by heart...
Particularly amusing is the visit of the head of the school board. Penrod is reading to the class his "model letter to a friend," just as disastrously pilfered from his sister's writing-table. Another high point comes after the Spartan initiation of Georgie Bassett, when Penrod and Sam report upon Georgie's indocility with a bereaved and Christ-like air. Georgie, the "little gentleman," has been badly over-directed in playing the bespectacled prig, with an unpleasantly forced result...
Leon Janney, as Penrod, is a talented and charming boy, with an infectious laugh and a most engaging swagger. But his face is far too pretty for Penrod, who would have been more accurately represented by Junior Cohgian, the youngster who plays Sam. If ever Hollywood does a story of prep-school life, which is unlikely, Leon Janney would make a perfect lower-form boy attending Sunday evening Chapel in an Eton collar...
...adult background is provided by Dorothy Peterson and Matt Moore, who are convincing as Penrod's mother and father. Zazu Pitts displays her agitated hands and middle-Western voice as the distracted mother of Georgie Bassett...