Word: berdan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...rank of U. S. writers is a large and loyal cult whose members are bound together by a common axiom of composition that they had to memorize in college: "Individualize by specific detail." They were all students of Yale's famed Professor John Milton ("Johnny") Berdan. Last week Johnny Berdan's former students, now heavily concentrated in Hollywood and Manhattan, as one man rattled their teacups (a Berdan way of saying they were unnerved). They had just learned that Johnny, after 38 years, was retiring from Yale...
...Yale men this was an event only less newsworthy than Professor William Lyon ("Billy") Phelps's retirement in 1933. It was also of interest to U. S. letters, to which Johnny Berdan gave Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Philip Barry, Walter Millis, many another notable author. Said Yale's President Charles Seymour, announcing "with regret" the professor's retirement: "The U. S. never produced a teacher more skillful in the field of English composition...
Famed is Johnny Berdan's course in Daily Themes. Each morning, five mornings a week, generations of Yale men have dropped their themes in a box outside Professor Berdan's foul-smelling office. The door is always open and Professor Berdan, smoking an overpowering Latakia tobacco in a meerschaum pipe loves to invite his students in, insist that they smoke a strong Cuban cigaret, talk to them for hours on end. He makes it a point to read every theme (200 a week) himself. In class he rips the themes to pieces, likes to make his students angry...