The Devil Rides Outside
by John Howard Griffin
ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-138-2 || Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-139-9 See below
ebook , 515 pages
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[Barnes& Noble Nook]
[Kindle]
ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-138-2
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-139-9
Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-140-5
The Devil Rides Outside is a study of the struggle between faith and temptation, a raw, sprawling work that seems to have sprouted like a mushroom in the garden ofTexas letters. ... Issued by a fledgling Fort Worth publisher, The Devil Rides Outside received surprising attention for a first novel by an unknown. Reviews were mixed. "Most of the novel's sound and fury is bound up with the medieval notion that sex is the domain of Satan," complained the Atlantic Monthly, but the noted literary critic Maxwell Geismar was impressed. He called the book one of the best novels of the decade and dubbed its author a Texas Balzac."
The Legion for Decent Literature, a Catholic organization, succeeded in getting The Devil Rides Outside banned in Detroit on the grounds that i t was unfit for children and adolescents. While little in the book would shock a contemporary reader, the novel was daring for the fifties. It contains a pair of passages that describe in exactly the same language sexual climax and spiritual rapture. Postwar censorship laws were a welter of local and state statutes, many of which, despite the historic 1934 circuit court ruling on Ulysses, still banned whole works based on isolated passages. In the spring of 1954 the book's paperback publisher, Pocket Books, arranged to challenge the Detroit ban. A bookstore manager was arrested for selling a copy to a police inspector; the court convicted, the bookseller appealed, and Butler v. Michigan began a two and-a-half-year march to the Supreme Court.
On February 25, 1957 ... the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously struck down the Michigan law banning The Devil Rides Outside. Speaking for the Court, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, "The state insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig."The decision effectively reversed an 1868 British ruling that for almost a century had remained the principal guide to Anglo-American jurisprudence on censorship and obscenity.
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Quoted from: American Heritage Magazine, February, 198 9 (Vol. 40, No. 1). See http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1989/l/1989_l_44.shtml
Critical Praise for The Devil Rides Outside
- John Howard Griffin's The Devil Rides Outside is indeed, along with James Jones' From Here to Eternity and William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, among the three best novels of the 1950s.
— Maxwell Geismar, author of American Moderns
- The Devil Rides Outside is staggering novel.
— Clifton Fadiman, Editor-in-Chief, Book of the Month Club
Reviews
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The New York Times1953
Griffin's Madame Renée is a frightful and horrible creature, but never a monster. She is pitifully human, too. She is a character such as Balzac would have enjoyed writing about. Any first novelist capable of creating her is blessed with uncommon talents.
-- Orville Prescott
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New York Herald-Tribune1953
Out of Texas -- and out of the Middle Ages, too -- comes this first novel in one of fiction's great traditions, a long, strong and tormented story of the eternal war between the flesh and the spirit. The tradition in which he writes is that of the confessional novel; and there are signs that we are in at the beginning of a literary career of importance.
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-- John K. Hutchens
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Readers nominate "Devil" for Pulitzer Prize
Saturday Review of Literature1954
This first novel has in it the power of life itself....
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Time MagazineNov. 2, 1952
The Devil Rides Outside shows that it takes all grades of crude to make a literary Spindletop. It is the first novel of Dallas-born John H. Griffin, 32, a blind veteran of World War II.... It has some things relatively rare in U.S. letters: energy, earnestness and unashamed religious fervor.
Author Griffin writes in the first person in diary form. His hero is a young American musicologist in France who arrives at a Benedictine monastery to study Gregorian chant. Author Griffin did the same thing, admits that Devil is at least an intellectual history. His hero is no Roman Catholic, but by the rules of the order he must live as a monk so long as he stays at the monastery. This is not easy. His unheated stone cell is bitterly cold, the food is execrable, and he must share such work as cleaning the primitive lavatories. Moreover, his brain is filled with images of his Paris mistress, his nights made maddening by dreams.... Gradually, the monks encouraging him, he begins an intensive self-search, is infected by a mounting desire to find God and live a life of the spirit. The stumbling block is sex.
When, after [an] illness, the musicologist moves into the town, Devil concentrates on life outside the walls. Now the assorted evils of everyday life in the world are seen in contrast to monkish goodness. Truly the devil rides outside, where spite, greed, hatred (and again & again sexual temptation) plague and disgust the hero.
The Devil Rides Outside is kept bowling along by pure writing steam. It is often repetitive and frequently staggers to a stop, but it is saved each time by a fresh burst of vigor and intensity.
The Devil Rides Outside remained on the Time Magazine Recommended List for ten weeks.
About This Author
Read more about John Howard Griffin HERE.
