Word: werfel
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...book on Roman Catholic America's monthly popularity poll is the work of a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia: Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette, which has sold half a million copies since its publication eight months ago. Many Roman Catholics have been amazed that anyone not of their faith could write so reverently and eloquently about the French girl, Bernadette Soubirous (1844-79), to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared 18 times telling her to spread the news that the waters of Lourdes had been endowed with miraculous healing powers...
...Others were Esther Forbes's conscientious, overlong Paul Revere and the World He Lived In ($3.75); Hugh 1'Anson Fausset's erratic but illuminating Walt Whitman ($3); Poetess Muriel Rukeyser's fervent celebration of the famously forgotten great man of science Willard Gibbs ($3.50) ; Franz Werfel's Verdi: the Man in His Letters...
...Your literary critic committed in my eyes and in the eyes of everybody I spoke to a really unfair attack on the greatest living exponent of the German literature in his article on Franz Werfel's Song of Bernadette in TIME, June 8. . . . Only Thomas Mann is in the same class...
Would the man who wrote the review of Franz Werfel's book, in the current issue [June 8], care to hear that he has done a perfect bit of prose? Who writes your book reviews ? They are always superior; this one, supreme. Now I shall have to read the book -which I didn't want...
Possibly the most moving passages in The Song of Bernadette give account of the conversion of Werfel's archskeptic, one Hyacinthe de Lafite, a neighborhood patrician. In his youth, an arrogant atheist" individualist-poet, he had not bothered even to visit the newborn, crowded shrine. But now in his old age he confronts in Lourdes's hospital the full weight of disease and death, and is reborn into the mysteries of his childhood. As Lafite, a cancer pregnant in his throat and his weary mind working at its poor height, is drawn, hypnotically, nearer & nearer the iron grille...