Word: prose
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Young College Men, Venturesome Lasses and Literate Gentlemen have long packed the Saturday Review of Literature's Personals with lonely heartthrobs and V-necked prose that made lively reading. But last week S.R.L., with the air of a matron swearing off sweets, announced that it would print no more "advertisements inviting correspondence." Said the weekly: its circulation had grown too fat for it "to monitor [the ads] properly." In his Manhattan office, Publisher Jack Cominsky was more blunt. "These people," said he, "should be going to psychiatrists. Their ads represent an aspect of the magazine which it has outgrown...
...Such passages give Davis' prose, and his story too, a quality of imminence-as though at any moment they might break out in crashing event. They never do. The action of the book, though now & again it holds some excitement, has no importance ; it rises quietly out of the big land, and sinks quietly back into it. The natural world, in fact, is the only real character in Winds of Morning; the people in the book appear chiefly as traits of that character. Ordinarily, this would be a fatal flaw. The measure of Novelist Davis' success is that...
...compared to the earlier ones. What is really important is doing two such plays together. Shaw's emerges as so good that what should be stressed is how vividly it differs from Shakespeare's rather than how it necessarily falls short. It sets some of the sharpest prose in the modern theater against some of the greatest poetry of all time; Caesar underscores the impotence of wisdom where Antony dramatizes the tragedy of folly...
...writers have given more for less money. Of Belloc's 100-odd volumes of prose and poetry (the first, Verses and Sonnets, was published in 1895) only two or three have been bestsellers. Such books as The Path to Rome, Richelieu, Marie Antoinette, and Cautionary Verses still sell well enough for Belloc to be able to drink good French wine. But the slight look of shabbiness about his 15th Century Sussex house, King's Land, shows the slimness of the owner's purse. The furnishings of the old house have been neither changed nor moved since...
...present in all its glory is Belloc's great range of tone-a diversity of poetic styles that travel all the way from nimble, sarcastic diatribes against the faults of "us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of men" to what his friend Baring described as "grave prose like the mellow tones of a beautifully played cello...