Word: vivid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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These descriptive passages succeed brilliantly. Author Lowry presents the Mexican scene with such vivid lavishness that by the time the reader has reached the end of Under the Volcano there is not an unfamiliar bird, beast or grain of dust. But the method which succeeds so well in regard to landscape is unendurable in regard to the human mind and soul. Author Lowry's psychoanalysis-with its interminable interior monologues and devotion to the tiniest turns of thought-results in a prose so coagulated by indiscriminate introspection that it bogs down like the characters it describes...
Carl Sandburg's Prairie Years and War Years are drawn upon, as are the biographies by Lord Charnwood, Beveridge, Tarbell, etc. But some of the most vivid passages are from rarely read 19th Century sources, among them Donn Piatt's Memories (1887), Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes (1868). Sample glimpses...
...passengers killed per 100 million passenger-miles flown on scheduled flights. But in the last four months, 74 men, women & children have died in U.S. airline crashes. Etched into the public's mind last week were pictures of crumpled wreckage and gobbeted bodies that were far more vivid than any statistics. In Congress, South Carolina's Representative L. Mendel Rivers cried: "There's something wrong with the whole doggone setup and something ought to be done about...
...that the trucking strike in London has presumably been settled--on the strikers' terms--the vivid drama of another government's wrestle with the labor problem will no longer be flashing danger signals in front of American congressmen. The course of the strike would bear trenchant reading for those who believe government intervention is the key to labor peace...
Hearst to King Features' Syndicate President J. D. Gortatowsky, Dec. 28, 1945: "I have had numerous suggestions for incorporating some American history of a vivid kind in the adventure strips of the comic section. The difficulty is to find something that will sufficiently interest the kids. . . . Perhaps a title, Trained by Fate, would be general enough. Take Paul Revere and show him as a boy making as much of his boyhood life as possible, and culminate, of course, with his ride...