Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...looking at the slave's wounded neck. "Your blood's red same as mine!" Twain's Huck, it will be recalled, was a good deal troubled by matters of conscience, and it took him most of the book to wrestle down the acquired prejudices of Southern boyhood. Hardly a doubt stirs this Huck, of course. He is a real nice boy from the very start -maybe just the littlest bit mischievous -and besides, everyone here keeps him busy singing...
...main story, is a hater of patterns, above all the repetitions of success. "The golden boy of American literature" at 26, Tarnopol has "a boundless belief in my ability to win." Why not? He has "never before been defeated." Graduated summa cum laude from Brown after a triumphant Yonkers boyhood, he manages to convert Army service in Germany into a prizewinning novel, A Jewish Father...
Andrews' character grows as each witness adds anecdote or insight. His boyhood hockey coach remembers him as a superb athlete who once said, "When I try my best I always seem to hurt someone." His pastor proves that John learned early when to bow to expediency. At school he earned every honor, but may also have planned the burning of a dormitory so he could be a hero by saving his sleeping classmates...
Small Potatoes. Then it was the turn of Maurice Stans. Wearing a tiny American flag in his lapel, Stans told of his boyhood in Shakopee, Minn., where his father had been a struggling house painter and the family did not have indoor plumbing. Stans recalled that he had slept under the rafters on the unfinished second floor of the house and "when it was below zero outside, it was below zero inside." Stans went on to become a millionaire accountant and Nixon's chief fund raiser; in 1972 alone, he added $55 million to the President's campaign...
Steffens did so with an ambition and energy that had not been apparent during a boyhood largely spent riding horseback in the California countryside. By 1904 Steffens was one of the nation's best-known journalists. The Shame of the Cities, a book based on his exposes of big-city corruption, helped arm the short-lived reform movement whose grinning figurehead was Theodore Roosevelt. "The man with the muckrake" is what T.R. (borrowing from Pilgrim's Progress) called Steffens, thus giving generations of crossword-puzzle workers the nine-letter word muckraker...