Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Perelman, S(idney) J(oseph) - Walker Gibson (review date 1958)

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Walker Gibson (review date 1958)

SOURCE: "'You Mustn't Say Things Like That'," in The Nation, Vol. 187, No. 18, November 29, 1958, pp. 410-12.

[In the following excerpted review, Gibson lauds Perelman as a humorist skilled in the use of language, but not as a great writer.]

The publication last month of The Most of S. J. Perelman, should remind readers that we have in our own country, a comic writer who has been carrying on a consistent and eloquent attack on dead language since about the time Mr. [Kingsley] Amis was born. Perelman has been quoted to the effect that Joyce is the greatest comic writer of our time, and that observation helps to suggest the particular quality of his own humor. It is a humor, richly represented in this handsome collection, that depends on the strictest sensitivity to the corniness of contemporary public language, laced (as he would say) with wild juxtapositions of traditional literary glop. The...

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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