Word: writes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Lewisburg (Pa.) federal penitentiary in December 1954-on parole after serving 44 months of a five-year sentence for perjury -he carried under his arm a package wrapped in Manila paper. Assuming that the package held his notes and papers, reporters asked if he intended to write a book. Replied Hiss: "I certainly intend to do some writing." Last fall the literary grapevine buzzed with the news that Manhattan Publisher Alfred Knopf had bought the Hiss manuscript, and the gossip columns predicted that it would be one of the sensations of the year...
Shortly before he died George Orwell asked that no one write his biography. Though much of his writing, even fiction, had been autobiographical, he valued privacy most of all the English virtues; and perhaps he felt he had himself made enough public use of his own life. In spite of his request, the six years since his death have left us three biographies and countless articles about his life...
Orwell believed clear thinking is both possible and important, and that clear writing fosters it. His design was to foster both. In several essays he made his plea for clear writing quite explicit, even listing the habits that make good style. But I think Orwell's message was best where less explicit; as a preacher he seemed to nag. I find his example more gracious than his sermons. If you believe it is important to write clearly, it makes much more sense to start by writing clearly than to talk about clear writing. That was what...
...Homage to Catalonia he attempted to write an objective account of the Spanish War. In this book--I think it was his best--his conclusions were sparse, but they seemed to come as discoveries. They exemplified the message that his later works elaborated: that if you make words only out of what you know to be true, and if these words are more often short than long, concrete than abstract, active than passive, the craziest-seeming truth may become clear...
...kind of realist to write about people with romantic souls is a most tricky and difficult business. . . . There does not seem to be any way at all of writing about them except satirically or angrily. Once a writer's eye gets chilly about their beautiful souls he is like the only sober man at a drunken party and the only decent thing for him to do is either to get blind drunk with the rest of the boys or else go home and scrub himself clean in a raging satire on the whole boiling lot of them...