Word: satirists
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...most accomplished contemporary stylist in the English language-sometime satirist, religious romantic and biographer -is also a social historian of sorts. With The End of the Battle, Evelyn Waugh completes a trilogy of novels about a segment of Britain in World War II. Neither as bouncy as Men at Arms nor as dissonant as Officers and Gentlemen, the third of the three is a blues for a bygone time...
...least-known of her novels, took some pot-shots at Manhattan's leftist intellectuals, with whom she had broken in the late '30s as one of the renegade editors of the Partisan Review. The Groves of Academe, in 1952, renewed her public fame and represented the familiar, unillusioned satirist at her best, with its caricature of a progressive college (Miss McCarthy had taught at Bard and Sarah Lawrence). As with her last novel, A Charmed Life, readers tried to match the characters with real people in the McCarthy coterie--and not always without success...
...what of brute, locked up with the rest? The answer is that Thurber considered himself, half correctly, a rough, bruising satirist. "I am in a corner without being backed there," he wrote, "and I often come out fighting." To be thought a nice, lovable old character must have been as hard to endure as the slow onset of blindness. He bore both afflictions with dignity...
Sinclair Lewis, by Mark Schorer. The author provides a fascinating but at times over-detailed biography of the satirist who turned U.S. Babbitts against Babbittry...
...into startled self-surmise, starting the agonized self-appraisal and self-doubt that has characterized much of ILS. social criticism ever since. In the process, Lewis helped destroy once and for all the U.S.'s lingering cultural provincialism, as World War II destroyed its political isolationism. Yet the satirist's lashing must always be to some extent a self-flagellation. No thoughtful reader of his books can fail to see that Lewis, rebellious, drunken and selfexiled, loved Gopher Prairie, and the U.S., and that he never really left it. His definitive biography is still to be written...