Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Author Murdoch mitigates the sordid in her story with a flow of wit that is civilized, unobtrusive and sometimes lethal. The novel achieves distinction in a series of brief sermons and reflections on the nature of God and the good that ought to make many an orthodox pulpit-pounding clergyman blush in envy. Yet the meaning of The Bell is muffled in final ambiguity, as the colony goes under in a tidal wave of newspaper scandal. With its strange but oddly exciting characters, its limpid prose, its sly wit and its ethical insight, The Bell unquestionably tolls...
Within the bare outlines of this sordid story, Author Wright hammers away at the brutality, based on fear and hatred, that the white world visits on the Negro. By this time, even Expatriate Wright should know that his picture is too crudely black and white: he writes as if nothing had changed since he grew up in Mississippi. But there is still so much truth in his crude, pounding, wrathful book that no honest reader can remain wholly unmoved...
First indication of this sordid program appeared when the high-minded Saturday Evening Post recently decided to end its own noble experiment by opening its virginal pages to liquor ads. As if this were not enough, the full scope of the industry's schemes was exposed at the recent meeting of the Distilled Spirits Institute. Here, an unidentified source disclosed that the industry may soon end the taboo on women appearing in its advertising...
...series of rude intrusions disrupt his neat, parklike existence. First, it turns out that his wife likes the wrong kind of matinee: one afternoon Michael peeks into her bedroom and sees her with one of his junior trust officers. He finds some consolation in a second marriage, but a sordid financial squeeze play threatens his castle in the conditioned air of Wall Street. Finally Michael decides that he has "waited all his life for a madness of the blood," and indulges it with his stepdaughter. In his desire "to become a man, as other men, to become an animal...
...drama called The Mountains, which was produced for a special workshop audience the following fall. The Mountains was a raw, unpolished production, little resembling the glib drawing-room fare produced by other members of the workshop. It was a story of the Carolina mountain people, dirty and sordid, yet filled with the mystical and romantic eulogization of the "land" which became a trademark of Wolfe's later work. Criticism of the play was highly unfavorable, and Wolfe became despondent: "I will never forget the almost inconceivable anguish and despair...." In his letters he lashed out again at people who talked...