Thank you for your thoughtful guesses. We have no match yet, sorry.
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More Clues]
The author showed singular writing talent and great promise early. His private prep school named him Class Poet.
His father died not long after,is father died, and the author's hope to attend Yale, the college of his choice (or indeed any college) became an impossible dream. It affected him all his life.
He moved to New York and began writing - articles for magazines, a collection of well received short stories, followed by a number of bestselling novels, plays,, essays, scripts, and was a columnist for conservative newspapers. In World War II he was war correspondent for the Pacific theater. One of his novel won the National Book Award.,
Readers loved his novels and the movie adaptions of some of them. Yet, despite the author's obvious writing skills, including perfectly spot-on dialogue. the acceptance by the writing establishment was not unilateral. The author's personality, and things he has said, could well have been the reason. He was controversial and called "obnoxious". He was known for his irascibility.
Brendan Gill, who worked with the author at The New Yorker, has said he could understand those who described the author Still, possible".
Gill believed the author's obs"ession with status was due to a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority because he had no college education. Still, he yearned for an honorary degree from Yale, but Yale was unwilling "because he had asked for it" (!). After the death of Hemingway, the author said - according to his official biographer - that made him (the autor) the likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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The time frame is important to consider. The author's career began in the early thirties. Two novels wer adapted for the big screen three decades later.
It has taken me inordinately long to type this because my vision is poor and typos abound. Alas, even a second and third checking of the text is not always successful. My apologies. for that.
More clues tomorrowabout the book.
