Seventy-Six by John Neal

Suggest and discuss books to read (all languages welcome!)
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Piotrek81
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Post by Piotrek81 »

From today's featured article on Wikipedia:
Historically distinguished for its pioneering use of colloquial language, Yankee dialect, battle scene realism, high characterization, stream of consciousness narrative, profanity, and depictions of sex and romance, the novel foreshadowed and influenced later American writers. The narrative prose resembles spoken American English more than any other literature of its period. It was the first work of American fiction to use the phrase son-of-a-bitch.
Copies of Seventy-Six had become rare as early as 1876 and the book was largely forgotten by the 20th and 21st centuries. The scholarship that exists largely praises the book's powerful and groundbreaking moments, but bemoans that those strengths are outweighed by the plot's incoherence and disjointedness. The preface by scholar Robert Bain to the novel's 1971 edition uplifts the story's groundbreaking elements, but blames its construction and overly sensational tangents for reducing its readability.
Text: https://archive.org/details/seventysixlove00nealrich
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