Word: bookishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Eddie Marsh worshipped his pious, bookish, tone-deaf mother (she "couldn't tell God Save the Weasel from Pop Goes the Queen"). She weaned Author Marsh on Hamlet's soliloquy, and he started her reading such moderns as Zola. She taught him to sew, too, and later, Sir Warrington Smyth, a schoolfellow, and "a powerful influence for good, fired me to knit mittens...
Creator of these bookish detectives is tall, goggled Scenarist Harry Kurnitz, longtime mystery writer for pulp magazines, who writes under the false-whiskery pen name of Marco Page and the influence of Dashiell Hammett. His characters first appeared last spring in a spade-calling mystery novel, Fast Company, in which the main victim was poetically conked with a bust of Dante. Last summer Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice played them first for cinema in MGM's fumigated version. In Fast and Loose, Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell show up as the likeliest pretenders to the places of William Powell...
...once shrewd and naive, lusty and bookish, youthful and pompous, the Odets personality of those days became a legend. Samples of it were "collected"' like Dorothy Parker's witticisms and Samuel Goldwyn's boners. Example: playing Mozart on the gramophone for a friend. Odets remarked: "Mozart was a young genius, too." Odets no longer has the same interest in gadding about, hooking up with celebrities, asserting his importance. Today most of his close friends are members of the Group. Most of his spare time is spent at home-playing the gramophone. His love for music is ebullient...
...That road led to United Press and finally to the New York Herald Tribune as a Wall Street reporter. His toughest assignment was the 1929 crash. In 1934 he quit reporting to write Imperial Hearst, which was successful enough to maintain him and his Vassar-graduate wife in a bookish Manhattan apartment. With the help of General Johnson and Secretary of Interior Ickes, who used the title for the theme of his attack on monopolies, America's 60 Families shot into the best-selling shelf...
Effeminate, bookish, a graduate of the University of Nashville at 14, William Walker was successively surgeon, lawyer, journalist before he was 29. In that year, having absorbed as much as he could hold of the expansionist propaganda then parading as the "manifest destiny'' of the U. S., he decided to colonize the Mexican state of Sonora. Short of men and food, still shorter on experience, the expedition lasted through seven months of skirmishes, mutinies, desertions, marauding and general futility. Relieved to get out alive, Walker limped across the U. S. border with 34 survivors, surrendered...