Word: tales
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...vibrant story is called for, since Middle of the Night is less a tale of December and May than of December and March. The stormy, immature, unhappily married heroine is a full-fledged neurotic, so that Middle of the Night concerns a problem personality as well as a problem marriage. And for something so complex, Playwright Chayefsky lacks both the capacity and the concentration; his play trades in banalities more pretentious than any it chronicles. It lists characters in the program as The Girl, The Kid Sister, The Manufacturer; it does not list scene changes but flashes them...
...academic world of linguistics and mythology has come what at first glance appears to be a half-serious fairy tale, filled with non-existent characters in a non-existent world. Yet even the most casual reader will immediately see that, while imaginary, the whole creation is not only elaborately developed but extremely serious...
This dramatic development depends primarily on an ever-widening focus of significance. The story begins as The Hobbit, a charming "fairy tale for my children" written twenty years ago, but grows up into the trilogy on an adult level. Within this saga the emphasis expands from personal to national to historical, thus heightening the seemingly untenable dramatic pitch...
This success as a story-teller is, however, only one aspect of the author's technical skill. By presenting the saga in the form of a fairy tale, the author has freed himself to present his own view of the world, untrammeled by popular prejudice and preconception. To create a hero or to pit man against fate in the world of familiar experience is next to impossible, for the modern reader has long taken for granted the scientific proposition that man makes his own history, no matter how far from his hopes it may appear...
...original finding of Cave One at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, makes a romantic tale of chance. Two shepherds, searching for a stray goat, climbed four hundred feet up a steep rock-fall. One of them casually tossed a rock to scare the goat. The missile entered a small hole, and there was a sudden clatter of pottery. Inquisitive, the two crawled in and observed several tall jars and a pile of debris. When leaving they took several foul-smelling scrolls, rolled up inside the jars...