Word: van
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With this tender masterpiece of home-spun comedy, John Van Druten proves to all and sundry that sophistication is not his only forte. It's the heart-warming story of the Hansons, a poor but honest San Francisco family of a generation ago, and it's headed for the land of happy hits...
...Mama's bank account" that gave Kathryn Forbes the title for her novel. Van Druten adapted her idea for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and the result is a very appealing family portrait that remotely reminds one of "Life With Father,' but makes the Clarence Day hit look like a Radcliffe Idler production...
...Van Druten has written and staged with the tasteful touch that made "Voice of the Turtle" a Broadway sensation. His characterizations in "I Remember Mama" have a human quality that few in the American theatre have achieved: the irresistible simplicity of good, kind, honest people...
...Little Colonel. Stephen Vincent Benét once called Van Wyck Brooks the little colonel of literature. Now 58, a ruddy-faced, grey-mustached man of middle height, he is as straight as an old soldier, somewhat resembles one in his severely simple working life and the spare common sense of his words. With the earnings of The Flowering of New England he built a square white brick house on the top of an isolated hill four miles from Westport, Conn. It has high ceilings, soft-toned walls, many windows, large rooms, a view of the Sound, books, comfortable chairs...
...There Van Wyck Brooks awakens early each morning, reads before breakfast, writes from 7:30 till midday, reads again in the afternoon. He uses a quart of black ink a year, has trouble getting the kind he likes. He is as nervous about starting each new book as he was about the first one. He follows no pattern in his writing, never outlines his work, does not know until he is half-finished with a book what form it is going to take. He is now halfway through the reading for the next volume of his history, which will deal...