Word: vivid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Gary is an Irish-born and English-educated novelist whose work deserves to be more widely read than it is. Unlike so many of his contemporaries who mount the novel as if it were a rostrum, Cary works in the major tradition of English novel writing. He tells a vivid story, creates characters as credible as if they were stepping on one's toes, and uses the English language with beauty and wit. Why he is not therefore a favorite on this side of the Atlantic is something of a mystery...
Caldwell was especially good at mimicking Southern folk rhetoric, its mixture of lecherous filth and vivid images drawn from rural life, its passages of whining literalness relieved by sudden bright patches of corrupt folk poetry. His ability at recording poor white and Negro speech was, in fact, greater than his ability to make creative use of it in the framework of a novel, which is why his best pieces read more advantageously as off-center anecdotes than as realistic narratives...
...designers and cameraman show an unusually vivid sense of period, place, mood, and the immediate, living moment. As a result, some of the picture seems to be happening for the first time, whereas the run of movies are mere illustrations of what happened in a script. But in spite of all the history that leaks in around the edges, this is essentially a routine western, easy enough to take and just as easy to let alone...
Nevertheless, many of the stories are notable simply because, in detailing murder and sudden death, they also give pictures-more vivid than history books, more penetrating-than novels-of their times...
...prospered, even the Puritans began to relax. The wily, pleasure-liking Judge Samuel Sewall, who had been one of the judges at the Salem witchcraft trials, arrived at a more tolerant vision of life, spent his last widower years wooing likely widows, and married three times. In his vivid diary, one of the best mirrors of the social life of his time, Judge Sewall noted his gifts to the Widow Denison: "K. Georges Effigies in Copper ... A pound of Raisins and Proportionate Almonds . . . A pair of Shoe Buckles cost five shillings three pence." He admitted to himself that "My bowels...