Word: themes
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...story has the strong smell of dreary sordidness. Degeneration is the theme; a playright and his actress wife, the characters. The playwright will not cheapen his work to pander to the petty tastes of the masses whose francs support the Theatre. He lives on the earnings of his wife. To gain food and clothing for him, she sells herself to a succession of stage-door libertines. He gets the food and clothes. Finally he turns to a variety of unpleasant activities, brings the curtain down by strangling his wife in drunken frenzy...
Circuit Judge Fisher, of Chicago, threw a bomb among the numerous sturdy opponents of birth control in that city (who include Health Commissioner Herman N. Bundesen, M. D.), when he granted a mandamus petition to compel the city to issue a license for the proposed birth control clinic, theme of great agitation. Judge Fisher's decision contained these words: " I am loath to subscribe to the proposition that knowledge of birth preventive methods would materially lessen morality. If true, it would be sad to contemplate the weakness of our moral sense." The city will appeal. It contends that there...
...Sergel takes for his opening theme the problem of the unmarried mother. To cut the issue clear he starts his principal character at the age of nineteen in the provincial Iowan town in which her lower middle class family has lived. With all the exaggerated sensationalism of a reporter on a yellow journal covering a four alarm fire, the author devotes nearly half of his novel to her experience with maternity beginning with a petting party and ending with a wedding...
...part of the business appears when it is considered from a literary point of view. We concede that an author may be allowed to delve into the realms of indecency as far as is necessary to portray the whole truth of his picture. But Mr. Sergel harps on this theme and its attendant circumstances for 176 pages--and does not reach the truth even then. His glut of torment is avowedly only to set the stage and fix the characters in their primary position, but even with this achieved he tells but half the story...
...Baxter had his fortune told by a gipsy the day he was born. She promised him all the court-cards in old Miss Lachesis' desk?but said he would be hung before he was 30. The prophecy was fulfilled, and the ingenious manner of its working out forms the theme of a typical McCutcheon thriller...