Word: twain
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...three literary giants in America in the 19th century's last decades, one, Mark Twain, evaded the strictures of prudery because he was a humorist and because he was Mark Twain. The second, Henry James, very nearly succeeded in turning the strictures into virtues. The third, and least, in some ways makes the most interesting case study. It was William Dean Howells. not Twain or James, who presided over American literature for 50 years, who fought the critical battles for realism, and who, as the country's first avowed realist, was righteously damned as a vulgarian...
...life of actual men and women"; such romanticists as Scott and Dickens were "dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to air." Second Deadly Silas. Howells' novels were written in a prose that both friends such as Twain and detractors such as H. L. Mencken admitted to be superb; and they were written about subjects that mattered-the hardening caste strata in U.S. society, the pain of divorce, the wrongs of a laissez-faire economy. Yet before his death in 1920, with the realism he had preached unshakably...
...Reivers, by William Faulkner. In a marvelously comic book, the sage of Yoknapatawpha County matches Mark Twain as a teller of tall stories, laces his narrative with agreeable anecdote...
...Reivers* William Faulkner plays a mellowed Prospero and proves an engaging fellow. Like an old man gossiping on the back stoop, he delights in sentimental recollection, revels in his role as a teller of tall tales, at which only Mark Twain is his equal. Above all, Faulkner carries on the flagrant, 30-year love affair he has had with Yoknapatawpha County and its ornery, enduring and, until now, doom-ridden people...
...closeness to the core of the situation on which it is making a comment. The best humor has always had the ability to cut through the carefully constructed cliches we have built around ourselves. We've had in this country a number of deft practitioners of the art. Twain, Lardan Benchley, Thurber, E. B. White, and more. We've had a good number of them...