Word: novels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Said Board Secretary A. T. L. Watkins: ". . . There are too many scenes of torture and novel means of killing . . . One or two blows in a fight should be sufficient. When it comes to a man's hands being held behind his back while his face is smashed to pulp, we draw the line...
When the movie version of William Falkner's recent novel, "Intruder in the Dust," arrived in Boston last week it brought with it some unusual praise and tributes, not the least of them being a New York Times editorial attesting to its excellence. It is an exceptional film, and an important one, but to this particular reviewer it falls considerably short of greatness...
...Manhattan's biggest bookshops, a salesman gestured cynically toward his Christmas customers. "Give them a fat historical novel and they'll trample every good book in the place to get to it." It was a familiar moan in the book business-even when the moaner had to raise his voice to be heard above his booming cash register. Yet as a summary for 1949 the judgment was too jaundiced. It was true that popular puddings were as plentiful as usual, with old practitioners like Frank Yerby, Marguerite Steen and F. van Wyck Mason tirelessly serving them...
...year drew toward its close, a wacky picture book, White Collar Zoo, stood at the head of the non-fiction bestsellers, and a vastly overrated picaresque novel with a panoramic ancient setting, The Egyptian, ruled the current fiction roost. One was a good-natured freak, the other an escape hatch, and neither of them was a suggestive commentary on the year's literary inventory...
Manners & Morals. All in all, the best novels of the year came from Britain. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was a grim warning of what the latter stages of statism could be like. A Book-of-the-Month Club choice and a bestseller, it was a happy combination of urgent theme and ideal writer that found adequate recognition. The Literary Guild also reached abroad, in a departure from its routine menu, to give its 900,000 members Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day. Long considered one of the world's fine stylists, Miss Bowen...