Word: aristocrat
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Like most Glasgow novels, this one is laid in Queenborough, the imaginary Virginia town which she had made as much her literary province as Hardy made Wessex or Trollope Barsetshire. It is the story of the ineffectualness of a Southern aristocrat, Asa Timberlake, who has lost his money but not his manners. The Timberlake fortune had been invested in a cigaret factory. Now factory and fortune belonged to the Standard Tobacco Company. Asa still had a job with Standard, but he never knew for how long. His wife, plain-faced Lavinia, had stooped to marry him. Later she developed...
...read in Lanterns on the Levee just what kind of memories he had. They covered 54 years of an active, sensitive, civilized life. They showed their author to be not only the "poet laureate of Mississippi" and one of the South's bigger planters, but a U. S. aristocrat in the Greek sense of the word...
Ginger Rogers clinched her stardom (and won a well-deserved Oscar) by the finest female acting of the year in her role of a spirited Irish girl from the far side of the tracks in Philadelphia. Madly in love with a Quaker aristocrat, Kitty finds that they can be happy anywhere except in the City of Brotherly Love--but the ties of birth and position hold her husband home and create a barrier between them. So Kitty goes out on her own, has a divorce and a baby, meets young doctor James Craig who offers her marriage and security. Then...
...original Southern type, "the core about which most Southerners of whatever degree were likely to be built," Cash selects not the aristocrat but the "backcountry pioneer farmer," the descendant not of English squires but of "half-wild Scotch and Irish clansmen." This countryman's outstanding trait was his lack of complexity. A direct product of the soil, he was "as simple a type as Western civilization has produced in modern times." To that intense simplicity, Cash assigns several Southern traits: individualism, puerility, a tendency to violence, romanticism, hedonism, piety, a passionate love of rhetoric and of politics...
...forget that he comes from the American theatre's royal family. If you can forget all that, and just take him for a drunken, lecherous, old man with a sense of humor and a flair of exhibitionism, you'll enjoy the picture. But actually, another aristocrat has bit the dust...