Word: tolbecken
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Dates: during 1956-1956
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...TOLBECKEN (370 pp.)-Samuel Shellabarger-Little, Brown...
...this posthumous novel, Tolbecken, he had to do no grubbing in libraries. Heroes do not dash, swords do not flash. But his old fans may decide that Author Shellabarger was writing something closer to his heart, if not to his imagination. The real hero of the book is an attribute: character. Old Judge Rufus Tolbecken has it in his bones, just as the family home in the town of Dunstable (somewhere between Baltimore and Philadelphia) has it in its proud colonial lines. But as the 19th century draws to a close, the judge's kind of character and uncompromising...
...American story of the clash of generations, the impact of modern life on tradition. That Author Shellabarger wrote it at a pitch of sincerity cannot be doubted. Unfortunately, he was a carpenter of fiction and not an architect. In his historicals, that fact was nearly a virtue. In Tolbecken it exposes all his built-in limitations. The story is wooden, the characters stock, and coincidence is made to do the work of imagination. Yet it is so rare to find a contemporary novelist writing in praise of character that the literary defects seem almost less important than the simple moral...
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