The crossing/Kinds of Love/The Antagonists/Love Story/Another part of the house

Fülszöveg

THE WRITTEN WORD STILL PREVAILS by Noel B. Gerson novelist and biographer "I just don't have time to read." How often all of us hear that, and we who are devoted to the written word invariably wince. It is an iroriy of our modern socieiy that technology, which has given us more leisure than any other people have ever enjoyed, promptly fills that time with frivolous, mind-emptying pursuits. Trivia inundates us, and the worst is yet to come; recent developments in mass communications threaten us with electronic substitutes for books as we have known them. But we who read books and we who write books need not despair. The word, on paper, still prevails, as I recently had ample cause to discover. When my biographical növel, T.R., a 225,000-word study of Theodore Roosevelt, became a selection of Reader's Digest Condensed Books (Winter 1970), I found it difficult to believe that its essence could be retained in a cut version. I soon learned better, and was elated to find that the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THE WRITTEN WORD STILL PREVAILS by Noel B. Gerson novelist and biographer "I just don't have time to read." How often all of us hear that, and we who are devoted to the written word invariably wince. It is an iroriy of our modern socieiy that technology, which has given us more leisure than any other people have ever enjoyed, promptly fills that time with frivolous, mind-emptying pursuits. Trivia inundates us, and the worst is yet to come; recent developments in mass communications threaten us with electronic substitutes for books as we have known them. But we who read books and we who write books need not despair. The word, on paper, still prevails, as I recently had ample cause to discover. When my biographical növel, T.R., a 225,000-word study of Theodore Roosevelt, became a selection of Reader's Digest Condensed Books (Winter 1970), I found it difficult to believe that its essence could be retained in a cut version. I soon learned better, and was elated to find that the condensed version retained every element of the originál, in story, characterization and flavor. Armed with this knowledge, l took four different volumes of Reader's Digest Condensed Books with me to the Indiana University Writers' Conference, where I taught the Növel Workshop. Time was precious, my class was large and the complexities of novelwriting are vast. But those four volumes were the only "textbooks" I needed. Within a short time my students were demonstrating sharp improvernent in establishing their themes, drawing their characters, plotting their stories and-that most delicate phase of the art-creating the desired mood. I came away heartened by the conviction that Reader's Digest Condensed Books has successfully met the challenge of the newer forms of communication. Let the gadgets rain from the skies and spring from the earth. The written word will not be driven from the bookshelves of those who treasure their cuitural heritage. Vissza