Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Rex Stout

Critical Essay by Rex Stout

Most of the reviews and nearly all the talk of this novel ["Gentleman's Agreement"] by Laura Hobson will treat it as a book about anti-Semitism. That is too bad, for first of all it is a good job of story telling. Mrs. Hobson had to choose her characters by types—that is inevitable in a propaganda novel—but, having picked them and named them, she put something much more human than synthetic sawdust inside their skins and pumped in real blood. The theme of the tale is anti-Semitism, there's no question about that, but it would have been a first-rate story about people no matter what the theme….

But while Mrs. Hobson undertook to make up and tell a story, and succeeded, she is probably willing to have her novel judged not only as a story but as a book about anti-Semitism. What about that?

It is overwhelming.

Probably a reviewer should...
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