Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Truth & Truisms. The chief pleasure of Ben Franklin during these years was journalism, and it is Franklin the journalist who dominates this book. There are the Addisonian "Silence Dogood" letters with their gently satiric barbs at Harvard College, bits of local gossip, humorous anecdotes, and a masterful and intricate essay on the value of a paper currency. In the profoundest sense, Franklin began a lifelong dialogue with his fellow Americans on their democratic destiny ("In those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own"). But entertainment always...
...behind the footlights, Anne Bancroft is always the serious, controlled artist, whose features can change from tenderness to humor to ferocity to sultriness with astonishing ease and conviction. Says her sometime acting coach, Herbert Berghof: "She is like a little daughter of Anna Magnani." In Miracle Worker, she is completely in charge of an extraordinarily demanding role, a role that requires of the actress what it required of Annie Sullivan in real life: the sensitivity of a poet and the strength of a piano mover. It is a role that is doubly difficult because it demands a violation...
...Silent Humor. Anne had known that she would be tapped for the part of Annie Sullivan ever since Gibson started working on the new play while Seesaw was still on the road. In the meantime, Anne became engaged, this time to Mario Ferrari-Ferreira, distantly related to the Italian auto family. But by the time Seesaw began its tryout in Washington, Annie was again fed up with the idea of marriage. "The play had become vitally important to me," she says matter-of-factly. "There was no time or energy for anything else." There was also another complication: her Catholicism...
...either, with Jefferson Davis, except stare into his eyes and say: "God grant you wisdom, Mr. Davis." Later, he regrets not having "poured out his soul," but he wisely suppresses the impulse again when, in his presence. Abraham Lincoln worries about the Constitution and tells two stories of doubtful humor. Most of the speeches and conversations of the great sound authentic; only the hero, Montague-Sinclair, is unreal. He is, nevertheless, an engaging figure to the connoisseur of the absurd in fiction-a kind of Candide without Voltaire...
...Moss Hart. Playwright (You Can't Take It with You) and Director (My Fair Lady) Hart tells of his youthful trek from The Bronx to Broadway. Few memoirs, theatrical or otherwise, can equal this autobiography's suspenseful plot, zany supporting cast and surefire humor...