Word: towers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Texas & Berlin THE LEANING TOWER AND OTHER STORIES - Katharine Anne Porter - Harcourt, Brace...
Cake Crumbs from Childhood. Six of the nine short stories in The Leaning Tower are crumbs from this cake of childhood-gentle, affectionate epitaphs for a dead world, which read more like a continuous record of nostalgic memories than like separate short stories. They spring from the grass roots as clearly as their author does. Katherine Anne Porter has become one of the intelligentsia's most admired short-story writers. She has lived in most of the intelligentsia's favorite prewar haunts: Paris, Majorca, Berlin, Vienna and Mexico. But she was born in Texas and schooled in Louisiana...
Some readers may be more impressed by The Leaning Tower's long (100 pages) title story, set in the Berlin of 1931, than by its vignettes of Texas. The elements of this story are a few dingy streets, a beerhouse, a room filled with "the winter day like dirty water," and five principal characters: a gawky young Texas artist; an aristocratic student from Heidelberg with a freshly gashed dueling scar on his cheek; a wolfish but pathetic landlady; Polish pianist; a browbeaten, impecunious professor of mathematics. Out of these Author Porter has carefully built a somber, horrifying picture...
...murmur went through the crowd. The Tricolor was going up on the tower of the cathedral whose stained glass windows Henry Adams once called "the Court of the Queen of Heaven." Beside the Tricolor waved the Stars & Stripes. Spontaneously the crowd began to sing the Marseillaise...
...Torre degli Amidei, Florence's most beautiful medieval tower...