Word: sagan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hothouse maturity of French teenagers has been a favorite theme of teenage French writers, e.g., Raymond Radiguet in Devil in the Flesh, francois Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse. In 1923, the late great Colette turned her fiftyish hand to the subject, produced a luminous and sensuously intuitive study of adolescent awakening. Republished in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter-century. The Ripening Seed has also taken scenario form as 1954's sensitively made but ineptly titled French film. The Game of Love. For the 16-and 15-year-old hero and heroine of this novel, love...
...looks as if TIME'S book reviewers would realize that they are confirming C. Wright Mills's suspicion that America is well on its way to hell when they give, in the April 30 issue, nothing but cheers to Franchise Sagan's "tale of extramarital fun" and nothing but sneers to Upton Sinclair's "temperance tract." How can the American people be other than "morally bankrupt" when the men who help to mold opinion (such as TIME'S book reviewers) operate under the code that naughty is nice, good is glum...
When convent-educated Francoise Sagan* dashed off her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, in a summer month in 1953 after flunking out of the Sorbonne ("With my family angry at me, I had to do something"), she became one of Europe's fastest-selling, most controversial authors. The limpidly written tale of 17-year-old Cecile (a year younger than the authoress), who maneuvers her father's two mistresses to meet her own needs and causes the suicide of one, quickly became France's biggest bestseller (450,000 copies). Translated into 14 languages, it won the Prix...
Cried Nobel Prizewinner Francois Mauriac of Sagan's talents: "The literary merit burst forth from the very first page and is indisputable." Others hailed her as a new star of letters. But not all were favorable; Paris divided between the pro-or anti-Sagan factions, and the critics honed their pens in anticipation of Author Sagan's second book. Would it prove her a writer or just another hot flash...
...second book is now out, and so is the verdict. Sagan's novel, Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile), written in two months, is the new literary sensation of Paris. FRANCOISE SAGAN REPEATS HER OFFENSE AND . . . WINS ! headlined one weekly. In Paris' Le Monde, venerable critic Emile Henriot wrote: "At her flying start two years ago, we could wonder if this 18-year-old girl, bitterly instructed . . . would be the woman of only one book, this terribly disturbing Bonjour Tristesse . . . We had to wait for her second book. Here it is . . . and it is perfect...