Word: commas
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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Compared with The Plantation (TIME, March 2, 1953), Author Pierce's impressive first novel, On a Lonesome Porch suffers from literary jerry-building. What saves it is its subtle, flexible prose, which can gallop in tense, comma-strewn sentences when Northern cavalry slashes through the Carolinas, or laze through a hot summer afternoon with three plaintive, motherless Negro children. And when Pierce softly traces Miss Ellen's genteel footsteps, he enlivens in a rare, vivid way the mind of the Old South...
...question that Ross wanted Shawn to succeed him, and the whole staff was pulling for him, too." It still is. Shawn is a gentle boss, and so sensitive to writers' feelings that he once called Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan in Havana to ask permission to change a comma. But this punctilious deference to writers' words may explain the magazine's increased windiness. Both fact and fiction pieces tend to run on interminably. As one writer puts it, "Everybody's pieces but mine are too long...
...each qualification, follows divergent ideas out of sight through cat's cradles of parentheses and dashes. He is as fond as Faulkner of the present participle. When it seems that he must stop, affix a period and begin a new sentence with "He said . . .", Simon merely drops a comma to catch his breath and continues with "saying . . ." If Simon's chapter-sentences are read quickly, and if the reader does not follow his natural inclination to stop and sort out thoughts and thinkers, the effect can be astonishing. The author skillfully creates a sense of frenzy and foreboding...