Word: tales
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field...
...program could be funnier, and truer to Twain if some of the cuttings were better. If Twain is "America's funniest humorist," as all the advertisements say, and even if he isn't--much of his charm rests on an especially endowed talent for spinning the old Western tall tale. Sometimes the story-teller, without cracking a smile, is able to convince his victim that his whole tale is gospel truth and is able to use this tale for all sorts of devious ends. But the comic aspect lies chiefly in the exaggerated proportions of the tale itself...
...thus seems strange that Holbrook finds it necessary to summarize or abbreviate some of Twain's best tales, for example the episode of Huck Finn and the runaway slave Jim on a Mississippi raft. Some local men, searching for escaped slaves, ask Huck if his companion is "white or black." Huck invokes the old tall-tale weapon, and convinces the men that his companion is his smallpox-afflicted "pop." The tale takes on fantastic proportions, but the authorities take in every word and even give Huck two $20 gold pieces before fleeing the pestilence...
That anger which most ruinously Inflamed Achilles, Peleus' son And which, before the tale was done, Had glutted Hell with Champions-bold...
...shivs at their throats, the leader in the besieged cell block on the phone to the warden, the Spartacus-in-denims who invariably fails to make it out of stir. Giving the old plot a new twist, Novelist William Wiegand (who teaches creative writing at Stanford) has produced a tale of a prison riot that is at once a violent melodrama, a psychological quiz and a political morality play...