Cass Timberlane
Encyclopedia
Cass Timberlane is a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 written by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...

, published in 1945. It is Sinclair Lewis' nineteenth novel and one of his last.

It was made into a romantic
Romance film
Romance films are love stories that focus on passion, emotion, and the affectionate involvement of the main characters and the journey that their love takes through courtship or marriage. Romance films make the love story or the search for love the main plot focus...

 drama film
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 starring Spencer Tracy
Spencer Tracy
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy was an American theatrical and film actor, who appeared in 75 films from 1930 to 1967. Tracy was one of the major stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, ranking among the top ten box office draws for almost every year from 1938 to 1951...

 and Lana Turner
Lana Turner
Lana Turner was an American actress.Discovered and signed to a film contract by MGM at the age of sixteen, Turner first attracted attention in They Won't Forget . She played featured roles, often as the ingenue, in such films as Love Finds Andy Hardy...

, directed by George Sidney
George Sidney
George Sidney was an American film director and film producer who worked primarily at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.-Career:...

, and released in 1947.

Timberlane is a minor character in Lewis's novel Kingsblood Royal
Kingsblood Royal
-Synopsis:The protagonist, Neil Kingsblood, a white middle class man, discovers that he is partly of African American descent while researching his family background...

.

Synopsis

Former Congressman and now Judge Cass Timberlane is a middle-aged, incorruptible, highly-respected man who enjoys good books and playing the flute. He falls for Jinny, a much younger girl from a lower class in his small Minnesota town. At first, the marriage is happy, but Jinny becomes bored with the small town and with the judge's friends. She leaves him for an affair with a lawyer, Timberlane's boyhood friend. Eventually abandoned by her lover, Jinny returns to her husband and becomes the good wife. This is Lewis' examination of marriage
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...

, love, romance, heartache and trust.

Cultural references

Wolcott Gibbs
Wolcott Gibbs
Wolcott Gibbs was an American editor, humorist, theatre critic, playwright and author of short stories, who worked for The New Yorker magazine from 1927 until his death. He is best remembered for his 1936 parody of Time magazine, which skewered the magazine's inverted narrative structure...

 spoofed the novel in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

as "Shad Ampersand."
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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