Word: periodical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Having already received his Bonus along with 3,500,000 other veterans, West Virginia's Johnson last week trumpeted: "The Roosevelt Administration has been eminently fair to ex-soldiers. There has been more done on hospitalization for veterans in the past few years than in any comparable period. . . . The Bonus is not an issue...
...front cover) Old history is in books and new on front pages. Yet neither tells the whole story of a people, a period, a place. Behind the extraordinary news in the papers, the decisive events described by historians, lies a mass of anonymous, miscellaneous human happenings, comprising the routine stuff of daily living. This is private history and, though it rarely gets into public history, it outweighs soldiers and statesmen, battles and booms, in the final balance of time...
...have figured prominently in the previous volumes. Red-faced, hard-drinking Charley Anderson barely appeared in The 42nd Parallel; Margo Dowling, dissolute and disillusioned cinema queen, makes her debut in The Big Money. Dos Passos' method is to follow one of his characters through some meaningful experience or period in his life, then shift to another. Between chapters he inserts the short biography of some real public figure whose career forms an oblique commentary on the imaginary character just described...
...catastrophic falls. One is the Newsreel, an effective muddle of headlines, fragments of speeches, news stories, popular songs. Each about a page long, they serve to fix the time of the action as well as to suggest the general moral and intellectual climate of the U. S. during the period. Thus the Newsreel that follows a chapter telling of Margo Dowling's miserable marriage includes a song that was popular at the moment, headline reference to topics that were then being discussed : . . . the kind of a girl that men forget...
...public heroes, absorbed the confusion and hysteria of the Newsreels, they are likely to feel that they have received a vivid cross-section report on some U. S. history in a manner neither novelists nor historians supply. They may question whether ordinary private life during that period was as confused and chaotic as Dos Passos represents it, whether he has not overshot his mark in bringing so many of his characters to violent ends, so many of their hopes to tragic frustrations. But they can admire without reservation his narrative style, bare but not bleak, naturalistic but not dull...