Rewards: We recall the melancholy fact that the first rhetorician to set himself the sticky task of discovering what Alfred Nobel meant by the stipulations for his literary prize blew his brains out soon after. That was Allen Upward in 1910; the struggle to discover became a book called The New Word; and the new word, requisite ingredient for picking up the Nobel award in literature, _was idealism. Right now the windy promotion of Upton Sinclair blows toward the Swedish Academy, and no one will be surprised if he gets it. The surprise would come from his not getting it. Idealism is a wonderful thing. … A more understandable prize goes to Marianne Mantell and Barbara Holdridge of Caedmon Records, for their project, well begun, to record all of Shakespeare. They have received the annual American Shakespeare Festival Award for 1962 for the twelve recordings thus far released. The completed works will have cost around a million dollars and will consist of 125 LPs, narrative poems and sonnets included.
Out from Under: The Mark Twain estate has finally allowed Letters from Earth to hit the bookstores, more grumblings against the American Board and Sunday School. The last release, a decade ago, from Twain’s wicked scribblings in theology, delicately sat upon by his family, was fascinating (the unexpurgated text of Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven and the first publication of A Letter from the Recording Angel, together as Report from Paradise, Harper, 1952) and should have been in readers’ hands long ago….. The Russians, says Reuters, will soon be able to read Doctor Zhivago.
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