Dec. 1 1944
Finished reading "Mr & Mrs Cougat" and "The Late George Apley".
Wrote Wes-
Learned a new "Solitaire" game.
Hope went to Arlon today
Mr. And Mrs. Cugat: The Record Of A Happy Marriage
by
If you're tired of novels heavy with 'social significance,' bored to death with historical novels, want one on which you can spend a perfectly good evening having a swell time, 'Mr. and Mrs. Cugat' is your meat.
We promise this book will give you some laughs, and we further promise that you'll meet, for a change, and affectionate and happily married young couple--a couple such as you've often known but seldom found in a novel. They have a perfectly grand time together at their parties, on their trips, and at home; they get into some pretty ticklish situations with their friends and manage to survive these--and their own domestic crises--with their sense of humor unimpaired.
Yes, you'll like them and laugh with them and long afterwards recall their predicaments when you are faced with similar ones. And don't overlook the amusing drawings by Floyd Hardy.
We promise this book will give you some laughs, and we further promise that you'll meet, for a change, and affectionate and happily married young couple--a couple such as you've often known but seldom found in a novel. They have a perfectly grand time together at their parties, on their trips, and at home; they get into some pretty ticklish situations with their friends and manage to survive these--and their own domestic crises--with their sense of humor unimpaired.
Yes, you'll like them and laugh with them and long afterwards recall their predicaments when you are faced with similar ones. And don't overlook the amusing drawings by Floyd Hardy.
The Late George Apley is a 1937 novel by John Phillips Marquand. It is a satire of Boston's upper class. The title character is a Harvard-educated WASP living on Beacon Hill in downtown Boston. It's an epistolary novel, made up mostly of letters to and from the title character.
The book was acclaimed as the first "serious" work by Marquand, who had previously been known for his Mr. Moto spy novels and other popular fiction. It was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1938. An article in The New Yorker decades later called the book the "best-wrought fictional monument to the nation's Protestant elite that we know of."[1]
The narrative begins in the early 1930s. Wealthy Bostonian John Apley engages a somewhat pompous literary man to produce a truthful book about his recently deceased father, George. This writer, named Willing, specializes in flowery, sanitized tributes to local luminaries, and he's disturbed by the young man's request for frankness, especially since George Apley was his good friend. But he reluctantly agrees.
Willing moves chronologically through Apley's 66 years of life, using letters from his late subject's personal papers. He frequently interjects his own comments, declaring his admiration for Apley the public-spirited citizen and bemoaning the disclosure of "scandalous" information about the man and his family. Willing, a comic character in his own right, longs for the old days in Boston, when subjects such as love affairs, alcoholism, mental illness and crime were kept out of the papers if they involved prominent people, and respectability was more important than personal happiness.
The image of George Apley that emerges in the course of the novel is alternately hilarious and poignant, and ultimately sympathetic. Apley is revealed as a man who was deeply conflicted about his status among Boston's elite, sometimes feeling imprisoned in his privileged world, but sometimes passionately defending the old order.
In 1944, the novel was adapted as a Broadway play, and in 1947, it was made into a feature film starring Ronald Colman. In 1955 20th Century Fox produced a TV series starring Raymond Massey and Joanne Woodward that ran until 1957.[2]
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