M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), and
Point of No Return (1949), in the fifteen years prior to his recognition as a serious writer in 1938 (when
The Late George Apley won the Pulitzer Prize), he had already gained the admiration of the mass reading public as the creator of dozens of entertaining and thoughtful stories for popular magazines--particularly the
Saturday Evening Post . Indeed, as biographer Millicent Bell has noted, because Marquand was so recognized as a "front cover" name during the years between the wars, he "was one of the makers of the
Post ... as much responsible for the character of its pages" as its fabled editor, George Horace Lorimer. Although his efforts for mass-circulation magazines are perhaps limited by their conformity to audience expectations for light and diverting fiction, they demonstrate Marquand's devotion to the highest standards of his craft and are among the best of their type. Furthermore, many of these stories deserve attention on their individual merits and as introductions to the themes more expansively treated in his best novels: the effects of success, money, and social class on character; the demand for and the emotional price of conformity; and the continuing influence of the past upon the present.
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