Word: dumbness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Novel based on the wire service providing race-track information to poolroom bookmakers, with much whipped-up and unconvincing material on the size of the racket, and much melodrama on the attempts of racketeers to get control of it. The best section, telling how dumb Joe Dugan of Kansas City unwittingly beat up a powerful gangster, who thereafter thought the worst mob yet had come to town, is so funny that the rest of the book seems flatter by contrast...
...should suit 28;* because she is blind, deaf and dumb, and a good Congregationalist...
Toward the last third of the journal, when Homer is in his 40s, he begins reading Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, Hemingway, confesses that his "whole attitude toward literature is undergoing a renascence." When, despite his sobered new outlook, he continues right up to his sudden end to be almost as dumb as ever, most readers will call his story a libel on even the most fatuous of would-be novelists...
...here (but he's smart enough to know how to be an amateur when the occasion demands, Bill) and he's burned up every league he's ever been in. There is the usual catch in this case, Bill, as in every other, viz, the boy's a little dumb, in fact he is awful dumb. What will we do? What will we do? Write me quick, because I've got to sign him up quick. You must know some way of getting him in and once we do we'll keep him there somehow. I asked...
Author Seabrook got the idea by looking around at his foreign-born neighbors in the Hudson River's Rhinebeck Valley, where he owns an eight-acre farm., In his boyhood days in Maryland and Kansas these neighbors would have been called dumb Swedes, squareheads, Dagos, Polacks, Heinies, wops, troublemakers, agitators and so forth. In Rhinebeck they were just neighborly Americans, Republicans, Democrats. Seabrook had a hunch that elsewhere in the U. S. the foreign born were equally good citizens. He decided to take a look for himself...