Word: civilizations
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...With the W" article (Dec. 25) you refer to the "War Between the States." Can this be a Hollywood inspired designation for the Civil War? Or what is its origin...
Romains' countryman, Andre Malraux, achieved in Man's Fate (1934), a story of the 1927 Chinese civil war, a more vivid and at times more exalted work of dramatic craftsmanship than Verdun. But Malraux was working within far narrower limits, in what physicists by analogy might call a closed field-more exotic, more melodramatic, less austere than Romains'. John Dos Passes' ambitious trilogy of pre-War to post-War U. S. A. appears nearer to Romains' in scope, but his great powers of narrative and evocation are spent on a host of minor characters...
...best of the book is its first half: a bleak, sharp-eyed, sensitive account of what the world was like to a boy on a cruelly poor east-Kansas farm after the Civil War. In those pages George Ogden does a job on U. S. rural life such as many U. S. writers have tried and as few, living or dead, could improve on. At its best, it is what Mark Twain might have told if he had had the courage not to be genial...
...Wind" is a magnificent spectacle. Knowing well that they would have a critical audience on their hands, the producers have done a painstaking job from start to finish, and have not been sparing with the money (as you doubtless are aware by now). The result--four solid hours of Civil War South, negro mammies, hoop skirts, and Clark Gable, all in technicolor--is mighty impressive. Vivien Leigh is absolutely all that could be asked in the way of charm, and Clark Gable, as everyone has known since the book was first published, fits Rhett Butler to perfection...
...other, less superficial criteria, "Gone With The Wind" is equally good. If Margaret Mitchell's book has a claim to be great literature, it is because of the wide variety of characters portrayed so skillfully and so vividly. Pre-and post-Civil War South has been discussed before, and will be many times again; but never has there been a Scarlett and a Rhett, an Ashley and a Melanic, an Ellen, a Gerald, a Mammie, a Belle Watling, and such a profusion of individual minor characters, all so real and so credible. Some are types, perhaps, and yet they...