as published in American Spectator, www.spectator.org, Dec. 19, 2018by James M. Thunder
I could not let this year go by without remarking that 2018 marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of a short novel, about 120 pages, that a young man published in 1928, and has seldom been out of print since: Myles Connolly’s debut novel, Mr. Blue. It is appropriate to do so at Christmas because, first, the protagonist, J. Blue, was in awe of the Incarnation and, secondly, because Connolly was an adviser to film director Frank Capra for what has become a Christmas-time favorite, the 1946 It’s a Wonderful Life.
It is said that many high schools and colleges, presumably Catholic, made Mr. Blue required reading at one time. It was not required in my Catholic high school in the late1960’s. Maybe it wasn’t necessary. It was one of two books that I recall my classmates made so much buzz about that I read them to keep up with what my peers were reading. (The other was James Michener’s Bridge at Andau (1957) about the Hungarian anti-Communist uprising.)
