Word: 20th
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...fact, the novel is getting more user-friendly in general. Fun and profundity are no longer mutually exclusive. Humor is back: Smith and Shteyngart are satirists, Foer and Mitchell are wits. Likewise, vigorous, plotty storytelling is in vogue again. For much of the 20th century the border between high and low fiction was diligently policed. Now there's an attractive trend toward hybridizing high and low, grafting the brilliant verbal intelligence of high literature onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction. "That used to be a real novelty act, or something that was done with kid gloves or with...
...walk from the beginning of the 20th century, stepping safely from decade to decade, and find one writer after another anointed as the Voice. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis ... but once you get to Douglas Coupland (who published Generation X in 1991), the last novelist who on a moonless night could be taken for the V.O.A.G., the trail goes cold. Not quite abruptly--for a few twinkly, magical minutes interest swirled around Wallace, and Eggers (more for his memoir than his fiction), and Chuck Palahniuk--but, ultimately...
...Armageddon," TR once told his followers, "and we battle for the Lord." Bush has never gone quite that far, but the world-saving impulse that is TR's most unappealing legacy inspires him even so. "Small-government" conservatives - which is to say, conservatives - wish he'd find another 20th century Republican hero. He might want to investigate Calvin Coolidge, whose own conservatism was more modest, more peaceable, and - by the way - more popular. If the president insists, he can even call...
Teddy stays with us because he seems so much like one of us. Although he was born in 1858, it's the 20th century he decidedly belongs to, the century he brought America into on his terms. Roosevelt's years in the White House were one of those hinges upon which the whole of American history sometimes turns. When he arrived there, he already understood the energies that had been building in the U.S. for decades after the Civil War: the explosion of its industrial power, the ineluctable impulse to expand. He used his presidency to discharge those energies...
Presidents come and go, but monuments are always with us. There's a reason Theodore Roosevelt is the only 20th century President whose face is carved into Mount Rushmore, the only one who could hold his own with Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. Roosevelt not only remade America, but he also charmed the pants off everybody while he did it. And just short of a century after he left the White House, in 1909, the collective memory of his strength and intellect and charisma still lingers. How many times over the years since have Americans settled their affections on some thoughtful...