Word: steinbeck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...SHORT REIGN OF PIPPIN IV (188 pp.)-John Steinbeck-Viking...
This is the central situation of John Steinbeck's latest booklet-an underdone novel and overdone gag which is a long, long way from wrathful Okies and Tortilla Flat. After Author Steinbeck and the Assembly make their momentous decision, there are of course almost as many pretenders in France as there ever were premiers, but the royal prize goes to a man who does not seek it-M. Pippin Arnulf Héristal, a distant collateral relation of Charlemagne...
...wants to be the law. beginning with the maddeningly un-French notion of everyone paying his taxes. Before the reader can say "Ca ira," the mob is in the streets clamoring for the Fifth Republic, and what happens to King Pippin after that is best left for Author Steinbeck to tell...
...dinnertime you'd cut a set of china." Uncle Chunk has long since warned Polk: "A rolling stone don't gather no mortgages." So off they roll, to the Southwest, to California, wherever a crop is making. Author Williams' world is an inevitable reminder of John Steinbeck's dustbowl refugees in The Grapes of Wrath, but she has incurred no literary debt. Hers is a book of little form, but the substance is fresh, and all the accidents, coincidences and rashes of sentimentality are not allowed to get too far beyond life's normal quota...
There is no excuse to review The World of Li'l Abner. As John Steinbeck says in his introduction, "It is my claim that Capp is probably the greatest contemporary writer." Everybody who has followed Li'l Abner through the years knows this, and the rest don't deserve to. So the idea of an introductory volume is inherently ridiculous...