Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There were no skyrocket bursts of great, fresh genius, and among the novelists many an old hand had shown a faltering touch. But 1949's books, fiction and nonfiction, accurately and often brilliantly reflected the state of man and his world. They were books colored by personal questioning, confusion and discontent; but also showing through was a determination to express both personal and public dilemmas and to face them firmly. More than in recent years, fiction in 1949 leavened its cynicism with compassion. In a great deal of nonfiction, skepticism was tempered with American optimism: though happiness and order...
...year drew toward its close, a wacky picture book, White Collar Zoo, stood at the head of the non-fiction bestsellers, and a vastly overrated picaresque novel with a panoramic ancient setting, The Egyptian, ruled the current fiction roost. One was a good-natured freak, the other an escape hatch, and neither of them was a suggestive commentary on the year's literary inventory...
...FICTION The war, the uneasy peace and the many-directioned search for personal and world repose accounted for most of the year's best-read books. No war books achieved the popularity of Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe or Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins. From Winston Churchill came Their Finest Hour, the stately, grandly stated second volume of his World War II memoirs. Britain's Field Marshal Montgomery went on with his battle report in El Alamein to the River Sangro, but its army-manual style limited its appeal chiefly to professional soldiers. A more dramatic...
...FICTION...
Bernard DeVoto is a historian and ex-Harvard lecturer who makes his real money by writing slick-magazine love fiction (usually under the pen name of John August) and gets his prejudices off his chest, with none of the historian's usual judicial balance, in Harper's Magazine. A few weeks ago, in Harper's, he proposed a public campaign of passive rebellion against J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation...