Word: styron
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...always a surprise to find a good first novel, but it never is surprising to find that it comes from the South. From Harper Lee. whose To Kill a Mockingbird won this year's Pulitzer Prize, the list runs back to writers of remarkable quality. William Styron, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter are but a few whose first fiction showed them to be in full command of talents that some novelists fail to achieve in a lifetime. How do they get that way? Is it, as Author Lee has suggested, that the South...
...Advise and Consent, Drury (1) 4. The Chapman Report, Wallace (4) 5. The Affair, Snow (6) 6. The Lincoln Lords, Hawley 7. Water of Life, Robinson 8. The Constant Image, Davenport (7) 9. The View from the Fortieth Floor, White (5) 10. Set This House on Fire, Styron NONFICTION 1. Born Free, Adamson (1) 2. May This House Be Safe from Tigers, King (2) 3. Folk Medicine, Jarvis (3) 4. I Kid You Not, Parr (4) 5. Mr. Citizen, Truman (9) 6. Felix Frankfurter Reminisces, Frankfurter with Phillips (5) 7. The Night They Burned the Mountain, Dooley...
This novel is a soy-pp. crying jag. The tears are shed for life as a lost cause. Such a melancholy viewpoint seems to come naturally to the Southern school of U.S. writers of which Virginia's William Styron is an unevenly talented member. Characteristically, most Southern writers equate the post-bellum fate of their region with the universal fate of man, and identify decline with tragedy. Amid romanticized passivity, violence erupts in Gothic melodramas of rape, murder and madness. Among the few exceptions: some of William Faulkner's Negroes, who achieve the dignity of stoic endurance. Unfortunately...
...Novelist Styron's first book, Lie Down in Darkness, was a Fall-of-the-House-of-Usher story about a decaying Southern family, and its lyric, doom-haunted evocation of the Southern landscape made the author the bright hope of U.S. fiction among some critics, as well as the hero of a lively minor cult on college campuses. Much of his new and far inferior book takes place in Italy, south of Rome, but the characters and attitudes are standard sub-Mason-Dixon. The two central figures are Mason Flagg, a rich neurotic dilettante, and Cass Kinsolving, an alcoholic...
...prep-school idol. Complicated flashbacks reveal that Mason Flagg is something of a heel, the hybrid product of a $2,000,000 trust fund and an incestuously possessive mother. By his 205 he is braining his wife with stray crockery, and swapping bedmates at Greenwich Village parties that Author Styron stops teasingly short of describing...