Word: brocton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Seen superficially, Arthur Winner needs no more education. He is a successful lawyer in his 50s, a figure of Roman rectitude, a bald, grave patrician, sage and self-contained. In his middle-sized home town of Brocton (possibly located in Pennsylvania), he belongs to a comfortable upper class that has the attitudes if not the acreage of landed gentry. Within a 49-hour period, fissures of revelation about Winner's closest friends-and about himself-rip open this safe and stolid world, and almost swallow...
Love and the law: those are the story's opposed forces, and much of their contention centers around Brocton's old courthouse, its pillared cupola flanked by great trees, its tolling tower bell pacing life in the town. In the gallery of lawyers serving beneath the bell, the outstanding figure is Noah Tuttle, Winner's senior partner, a doughty old lion of the law in his white-maned 80s, crotchety, plainspoken, a portable archive of torts, statutes and the cumulative wisdom...
This controversy may be heightened by Cozzens' feudally patronizing portrayal of the Negroes who serve Brocton's first families and are treated by them as near equals precisely because they make no unseemly claims to equality, e.g., in Arthur Winner's church, the Negro sexton deferentially takes communion last. Racially barbed is Cozzens' depiction of Eliot Woolf, a razor-sharp New York lawyer and a Jew-turned-Episcopalian whose "astute smelling-out of every little advantage . . . outside due process" makes Arthur Winner slightly queasy...