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    The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking
    The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking
    The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking
    Ebook403 pages5 hours

    The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking

    By James Branch Cabell

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateSep 1, 1998
    The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking
    Author

    James Branch Cabell

    James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell’s worked appeared in both Harper’s Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.

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    • 4/5
      This is probably the one book by Cabell the critics like least . . . or is that "detest the most"? It is the tale of an on-the-make lover, Robert Townshend, and his trail of courting young women, one by one. The book is written in the first person. It relates a series of liaisons not so much dangerous as callous and calculating. And yet, in the back of the narrator's mind, this indication that he's missing something. The comedy reaches its highest point in a clash of mutual betrayal by two lovers who engage in love only to make literature of it. This is one of the funnier moments in Cabell's oeuvre, though, perhaps, it does not redeem a novel from what, in its day, was its obvious immorality. Today, of course, most readers would be bored, and see not so much immorality as too much talk.Times have changed. I'm afraid I still like the book, though.

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    The Cords of Vanity - James Branch Cabell

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