Word: satanical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sure to provoke a row when it comes out next month is Letters from the Earth, containing hitherto unpublished, antireligious essays by Humorist Mark Twain. In the guise of Satan writing to the Archangels Gabriel and Michael, Twain pictures man as the foolish and conceited victim of his own preposterous religious beliefs. Coming from manuscripts dated in the last few years before Twain's death in 1910, the book was pieced together by the late Bernard DeVoto in 1939. But the content so disturbed Twain's Christian Scientist daughter, Mrs. Clara Clemens Samossoud, now 88, that she refused...
...newsman, ex-publicity man and former labor union official, got up before the Western states Democratic conference in Seattle to blast what he called some of the myths of modern America. Among the myths, said Ferry, was the one that pictured Communists as "nine feet tall, craftier than Satan, the most expert managers the world has ever seen, not human beings like ourselves but a race apart, determined to put man and God into jail forever...
...vast retreat from the crisp analysis of his earlier writing, is less literary criticism than a diatribe against Christianity. Empson fears that literary criticism has fallen into the hands of T. S. Eliot and the "neo-Christian movement." which judges all literature from a Christian viewpoint. Empson finds Satan a more likable character than God in Paradise Lost. Milton's God is "astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin" down to "flashes of joviality" and "bad temper," writes Empson. He tortures angels and mankind for his own amusement. Satan, on the other hand, behaves like a democrat toward fellow fallen angels...
...ringing a bell, dancing in the streets, clapping and singing. His sermon to the swallows, his conversion of his friends are as beautifully rendered as they are in The Little Flowers of St. Francis. ''God forgive me," Francis tells his Sisters, "I feel sorry even for Satan. There is no creature more unfortunate, more wretched than he, because he was once with God, but now he has left Him, denied Him and he roams the air inconsolable." Brother Mouse. Kazantzakis' prose moves with the stateliness of a funeral dirge as Francis, bleeding from the Stigmata and nearly...
...early writing, derivative and totally unoriginal, deeply dissatisfied him. "Many times I contemplated suicide because of my intellectual impotence. . . . Satan did not allow me to express my individuality." And though he was outwardly a normal Hasid, the people of his town suspected his untraditional intellectual activity. His brother went to Russia and involved himself in the revolutionary movement...