Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground: Essays 1927-1944

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The Condemned Playground

(1945) is a volume of reprinted essays, reviews and other prose pieces by the English critic and literary journalist Cyril Connolly. It gathers a selection of his articles published between 1927, when at the age of twenty-three he had started working as a reviewer for the

New Statesman

and other magazines, and 1944, by which time he had entered his forties and was editing the leading monthly review

Horizon

. Most of these pieces are book reviews, but interspersed among them are some travel sketches, parodies, fragments of diary and memoir, and brief exercises in dystopian satire. The volume concludes with excerpts from Connolly’s editorial “Comment” pages from the early years of

Horizon

. This was his fourth book, but most of its contents had originally…

2026 words

Citation: Baldick, Chris. "The Condemned Playground: Essays 1927-1944". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 August 2023 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13637, accessed 21 November 2024.]

13637 The Condemned Playground: Essays 1927-1944 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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