Katharine Fullerton GerouldRecensioni
Autore di Vain Oblations
Recensioni
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"I have waited thirty years to hear some eminent English critic call him a great writer."
Gerould laments his diminished reputation, which she attributes partly to his constantly shifting style, which confused the literary critics, and his preference for short-form prose which wasn't taken seriously.
The last piece in the book is an excellent article on the Dempsey/Tunney fight in Philadelphia in 1926, which she witnessed, and describes in mythological terms as a battle of Titans. This, and the one on Kipling have a passion largely missing in the others. She wonders why there isn't any quality fiction coming from the South:
"This, then, is our dilemma. We are given sentimental portraits of which the only convincing quality is a certain desuetude." "If the Southerner wants the Northerner to forget the child labor and lynchings and sharecroppers and chain gangs of the news columns, let him look to his fiction. At present, literary evidence is to the effect that citizenship in Dixie is on a lower level than elsewhere."
There are pieces on the American penchant for divorce, on the natures of essays and why they are no longer valued [Americans are getting stupid], etc. Most of them are traditional essays in which she presents a proposition and develops it. She doesn't spare the rod in her disparagement of the current social and cultural situation. Her style is of a cheerless New England schoolmarm with a ruler poised above your knuckles, but she develops her points thoroughly.