Word: reade
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Delirious Denunciations. Re-reading Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, the New York Herald Tribune's Lewis Gannett asked: "Is this the book that launched a thousand quips, and stirred the orators to deliriums of denunciation? Main Street doesn't read like a crusading book today. Maybe it never was as much'a crusading book as some of its readers assumed." Francis Hackett found Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms has been made "trite" by time and another war. Hackett's conclusion, which would call many Hemingway fans to arms: "[This] lyrical novel...
Punchy Prose. Clifton (Information Please) Fadiman thought that an impressive-and depressing-fact about the past 25 years was the decline in reader "attention." Readers refused to read anything except "the shortened paragraph, the carefully measured column, the 'punchy' sentence." The whole thing had reached its climax, he thought, in the new Cowles-published Quick-"a news digest of news digests." Wrote he: "One can easily imagine a digest of Quick (Quicker) and finally one of Quicker (Quickest). From Quickest to the nonreading of the news seems a logical next step...
...nearly 14 years, Scoopy, a tiger-striped torn, had made his home and office in an In box on the desk of Publisher Isabel Bryan, a seventyish spinster, in the cluttered basement office of the Villager. Scoopy's byline and photograph had graced a widely read column of jottings and musings ("Scoopy Mewses") on the editorial page. Artists painted Scoopy's portrait, photographers snapped him, the Christian Science Monitor sang his praises...
...Until I read Lysenko's speech," he says, with a nod to the party, "I had not recognized the idealistic character of Mendel's formulation of his results." Lysenko, he argues, opened Haldane's eyes to a new refinement of the truth: "What is inherited is not a set of characters, but the capacity for reacting to the environment in such a way that, in a particular environment, particular characters are developed." Genes "exhibit a good deal of stability in their reproduction," Haldane writes, but not "complete stability, or evolution would be impossible." Parting company with Lysenko...
Later he actually wanted to be an actor, but failed; from play-acting he turned to playwriting. He read widely and weirdly; like Friedrich Schiller's heroes, he considered himself a rebel; like Kierkegaard, a pessimystic; like Darwin, a scientist; like Goethe's Faust, he turned to black magic (which he practiced in his attic). When he was crossed, he would roam the woods lashing at branches and hacking down young trees; sometimes he would climb a tree and yell defiance at the universe...