Word: thinking
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With its soda-pop and jellybean atmosphere, San Francisco's Blum's (rhymes with Tums) looks like any old-fashioned corner candy store. Blum's hustling, bustling proprietor, Fred Levy, 37, wants his customers to think that's just what it is. But the atmosphere is deceiving. Blum's sells more candy (780,000 lbs. last year in its San Francisco store alone) than any other retail store in the world, and has a list of mail-order customers that reads like Who's Who (among them: Eisenhower, Noel Coward, Jim Farley, Lauren Bacall...
...though he later recalled it effectively in So Little Time) the war roused in him no Hemingway impulses to write about it. "Of course I got frightened to death on a number of occasions and I saw a lot of people get killed, but I don't think it did very much...
Insists Marquand: "I still don't think [Wickford] is like my family." But, Apley and Wickford included, his best writing has been about the lives and locales he has known from boyhood. He thinks B.F.'s Daughter, which preceded Point of No Return, failed to come off because its locale, wartime Washington, was a transient experience for him. The middle-class axis he draws on best runs from Newburyport to Boston to New York...
...mostly environment you're coping with and you have mighty little chance to make it yourself. I don't see that many people are particularly captains of their fate. They bat it out, but do they really get what they want? I'm damned if I think...
...many of Marquand's readers, Point of No Return will seem a little more troubling and pessimistic than most of his works. But Marquand thinks that man is slowly growing up and that man's hope lies in a prospect of greater maturity. "Most people," he said, "never grow up. The thing we've got to do in our institutions is try to build up more maturity. Mature people are happier. At least they can rationalize the world in such a way that they are not going to beat their heads against a wall. I certainly think...