Word: twain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Faulkner is perhaps the most gifted of living U.S. writers. He can be as funny as Mark Twain, as exalted as Melville, as solid as Joyce and as dull as Dreiser; but he has never done a book which has the sure, sound permanence of any of these men. Go Down, Moses, like most of Faulkner, is brilliant and uneven. Its special value is its evocative (though local) exploration of the U.S. national source and dawn. In it is a sometimes merely yeasty, sometimes 100-proof sense of those powers and mysteries of land and the people on it which...
Three composers went to work on a job usually reserved for painters. Aaron Copland dug into a Modern Library version of Abraham Lincoln's life and letters, and tried to write down his impressions in music. Jerome Kern thumbed through his Mark Twain first editions and manuscripts in his Beverly Hills library. Virgil Thomson spent two hours in Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia's City Hall office in Manhattan, watched and jotted down music while the Mayor received visitors. He also spent a morning in Pundit Dorothy Thompson's library while she read and, after her fashion, meditated...
...stories in this unpretentious book have that rare quality of truly democratic fiction: like stories by Mark Twain and Kipling and Dickens, they read even better aloud than silently, and are for almost any reader, of almost any age. Though Eric Knight invented them, they seem like genuine English folk tales. Their further virtues are rich characterizations; equal ease with fantasy and realism; dialect which is never phony, always funny...
...revealed that headquarters in Washington were alive to the danger. The blame was placed on the two commanders for two common military failings: 1) complacent disbelief in the danger of which they had been warned; 2) feeling that Navy was Navy and Army was Army and never the twain should cooperate...
...W.G.N. handbook referred to in TIME of Dec. 1, telling how Homer, Dickens, Kipling, Mark Twain, et al. would have liked to work on the Chicago Tribune, I might also mention a couple of chaps who doubtless would have felt right at home on the Tribune staff: Ananias and Baron Munchausen...