The Forests of the Night the war as it really was, as James Kirkup observed, an "acid portrait of those who played at being members of the [French] Resistance". The novel's theme and title come from the opening lines to William Blake's poem "The Tyger": "Tiger, tiger, burning bright - in the forests of the night." "The Forests of the Night" was translated in 1951 into English by Nora Wydenbruck; it has not been re-printed since. Francis is the son of the Comte de Balansun, whose family resides in the French town of Saint-Clar, near the Pyrenees. Francis, in the beginning of the novel, skips
Burning Bright of the book were as poor as the reviews of the stage production. While some critics acknowledged it for the experiment that Steinbeck had intended, it was seen as peculiar and at best moderately effective. The artificial use of language, while necessary to allow the characters' development on the stage, jarred with the critics reviewing the novelization, as did Steinbeck's overemphasis of the message of the play. Burning Bright Burning Bright is a 1950 novella by John Steinbeck written as an experiment with producing a play in novel format. Rather than providing only the dialogue and brief stage directions as