Word: langly
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...fortitude. When he is in civilian clothes, the public opinion polls eagerly tabulate his beliefs, his prejudices, his tastes. Few contemporary novels reflect this revolution in the status of the Average Man so sharply as Lower than Angels. Its hero is a character Sinclair Lewis might have drawn: Marvin Lang, son of a Staten Island delicatessen merchant. The story records his progress to a butcher shop, to the Army in World War I, to ownership of a prosperous market...
There are only two settings in Lower than Angels. One is Brooklyn, where Marvin lived until he was ten, in a railroad flat in Grandma Lang's home. It was full of beaded curtains, canaries, chairs with claw feet and red leather seats, gaslights, knickknacks, onyx clocks and vases filled with cattails. From an upstairs window Marvin could look down upon flower gardens and a spider's web of clotheslines forever hung with grey underwear. His father, who then had charge of the hardware section of Bohan's department store, was a Republican with firm convictions about...
Delicatessen Adventure. The other setting is the Lang delicatessen store in the village of Belle Bay on Staten Island. Bought with the $6,500 the Langs got for Grandma's house, the store was the biggest adventure of their lives. Until this point, Lower than Angels seems only another story of the decline of the lower middle class. But this store makes money. A tan, two-story-and-attic house, with its porch remodeled into a store front, it stood in a village where there were sycamore and elm trees over the streets, a Methodist Church where Marvin...
...style is breezy, formless, effective. Like Sinclair Lewis' books, Lower than Angels is remarkable for its accumulation of commonplace social history, and for its unsparing honesty. It is sometimes little more than a catalogue of impressions, saved from tedium and pretentiousness by Karig's humor. Marvin Lang has all the characteristics of Babbitt. He is smug, ambitious, self-righteous, calculating. Unlike Babbitt, he has a mean streak, especially in his relations with women. His life is actually harsher than Babbitt's was. But his enjoyment of his stale jokes is genuine; his faith in his secondhand opinions...
Unlike the fairy stories of Hans Christian Andersen, Laboulaye, Lang and Perrault, Grimm's Fairy Tales (as they became known in translation) were not primarily literary creations. The by-product of philological research, their collection began with the chance discovery by Jacob Grimm of a selection from the Minnesingers in the library of his law professor. Scholarly Jacob and his gentler, gayer brother Wilhelm, who had shared the same bed as children, the same room as students, from that moment dedicated their lives to tracking down, deciphering and recording their country's folklore...