Word: background
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With Edgar Wallace's background, an other writer might have been deflected from money-making by social conscience or social anger. By-blow of a provincial actress, adopted into a Cockney fishmonger family, he quit school at 12, worked as newsboy, printer's devil, hod carrier, milkman's helper, joined the army at 18, got plenty of hard knocks as he rose from jingo Boer War correspondent to London newspaper editor to rich writer. But said Edgar Wallace in later years: "There cannot be much wrong with a society which made possible the rise of . . . Edgar Wallace...
Israel Joshua Singer's big book, published two years ago, was The Brothers Ashkenazi, a chronicle of Polish Jewry told against a background of the textile industry of Lodz. Critics praised the vigor of its narrative, verisimilitude of its atmosphere, especially its detachment. Some critics called it a Polish Forsyte Saga; a few went so far as to call Author Singer the Polish Tolstoy...
Letter to the Editor:-I think it is wonderful the advantages boys have who go to Harvard with its background of 300 years of educational preeminence. Those of us who for financial reasons have to send our children to Wesleyan or Bowdoin just can't hope to give them an opportunity to learn how to swallow live goldfish. -Boston Globe...
...relations between England and France he felt are now better than ever, because there is an understanding that has gone down to the masses. America is being increasingly drawn into this alliance both because of her common background and the fact that her future is insolubly wound up with the existence of the French Army and the English Navy...
...critics called Josephine Herbst's The Executioner Waits one of the best novels of the year, ranked it and its predecessor, Pity Is Not Enough, just below the novels of John Dos Passes. A modern U. S. tragedy, told against a big background, these novels traced the history of the Pennsylvania-Dutch Trexler family from post-Civil War days to 1929, at once took rank as one of the best chronicles of a U. S. average family and a social...