Word: armchairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cherished place in American literature. American readers cheered along as an excusably impoverished hero strove for the big business deal, the big money, and the big time. The hosts of explanations suggested for this popularity run from the Freudian (a need for vicarious gratification and fulfillment, experienced by armchair moneymakers) to the conspiratorial (sedatives written by a malevolent ruling class to substitute for the real thing) to the jingoistic (pride in the American inventions of Individual Initiative and the free market...
...Ford is amused by the tortoise-shell wastebasket that hangs from an armchair used by Grant. She is intrigued by two sewing tables from 1810 made by Duncan Phyfe. Small and elegant when closed, they sprout drawers and shelves like magic...
...strip's pivotal character is the pencil-nosed naïf Michael J. Doonesbury, a founding member of the Walden Puddle Commune and an armchair liberal who spends much of his time, quite literally in an armchair, sampling the world's lunacy from television newscasts. He seems to have a gift for the mal mot, telling a menacing group of black separatists, "Hey, ol' Martin Luther King was one heck of a fellah, wasn't he?" or informing a $65,000-a-year rock entrepreneur in California that "back East you 'Frisco hipsters are kind...
...Doorbell Rang and Too Many Cooks while puttering about his daily cooking or gardening chores, then sit down and type out a complete mystery in 38 days of writing. Stout's agoraphobic master sleuth, who made his first appearance in Fer-de-Lance (1934), was an intuitive armchair detective in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. Wolfean devotees have contended that their hero's infinite array of adroit solutions stemmed from his creator's multifaceted life. A youthful mathematical prodigy, Stout was a prolific freelancer, an ardent champion of political causes and a jack-of-most-trades...
Sand's is a life that offers strong temptation for armchair psychologizing, and unfortunately Cate succumbs. Although his narrative does justice to Sand's complexity, his labels do not. She is diagnosed as "a do-good mystico-religious personality" with a "hairshirt complex," and her sexual frustrations are rather cavalierly attributed to a chronic case of "nympholepsy"−the desire for an ecstasy so sublime that no mortal can satisfy it. Gate also makes Sand do some special pleading for viewpoints that are clearly his own. He conjectures, for instance, that "were she alive today, Sand would regard...