Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Perelman, S(idney) J(oseph) - Harry Gilroy (review date 1949)

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Harry Gilroy (review date 1949)

SOURCE: "Perelman on the Loose Again," in The New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1949, p. 27.

[In the following review of Listen to the Mocking Bird, Gilroy describes Perelman the critic, the world traveler, and the satirist.]

Here is a fine, light book, too light to break the nose of a dozing reader, which unquestionably enriches the recumbent culture season. The subject is the personality of Perelman, split in this collection of pieces from The New Yorker into three parts. There is Perelman, the book critic who deals exclusively in novels of the grand passion after they have ripened to a state of deliquescence; the world traveler who never fails at each stop to get into more trouble than the Swiss Family Robinson, and the reincarnation of Molière turned loose on chain drug stores and other American phenomena.

For the first of these roles it appears that Perelman was...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. The Saturday Review of Literature (review date 1937)
   2. Beatrice Sherman (review date 1943)
   3. Time (review date 1943)
   4. Eudora Welty (review date 1944)
   5. Thomas Sugrue (review date 1944)
   6. Russell Maloney (review date 1946)
   7. Harry Gilroy (review date 1949)
   8. The New York Times Book Review (review date 1950)
   9. Ted Robinson, Jr. (review date 1952)
   10. Herbert Kupferberg (review date 1955)
   11. Dorothy Parker (review date 1957)
   12. Walker Gibson (review date 1958)
   13. Eudora Welty (review dates 1958 and 1970)
   14. Michael Flanders (review date 1962)
   15. The Times Literary Supplement (review date 1962)
   16. S. J. Perelman with William Cole and George Plimpton (interview date 1963)
   17. Norris W. Yates (essay date 1964)
   18. The Times Literary Supplement (review date 1967)
   19. Richard Freedman (review date 1970)
   20. Roderick Nordell (review date 1970)
   21. Stefan Kanfer (review date 1970)
   22. Paul Theroux (review date 1976)
   23. Paul Theroux (review date 1977)
   24. Michael Wood (review date 1978)
   25. Barry Fantoni (review date 1978)
   26. Marshall Brickman (review date 1981)
   27. Terry Teachout (review date 1981)
   28. Wilfrid Sheed (review date 1981)
   29. Prudence Crowther (review date 1984)
   30. Steven H. Gale (essay date 1987)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright