Word: cobbler
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Honoré de Balzac did not look or act like a writer, and the literary assessors of his time declined to treat him as one. He was short, fat, gap-toothed, messy, and, according to one contemporary, had "the face of a pantler, the general look of a cobbler, the girth of a barrelmaker, the manners of a hatter." Estimates of his work were hardly more flattering: Sainte-Beuve dismissed his style as "prolix and formless, slack." The author of La Comédie Humaine, that panorama of post-revolutionary France, died up to his chins in debt...
...Arabs brought some of these finds to Kando, the former Bethlehem cobbler who made himself an antiquities dealer by selling the famed Dead Sea Scrolls. Kando in turn alerted American archaeologists working in Israel, and Harvard's Frank M. Cross Jr. went to Israel to acquire and study the Samaritan finds. Now Archaeologist Cross knows more about ancient Samaritan history than does the remnant of the tribe that still survives...
...Danish town of Odense, all the signposts carry an extra arm. It points the way to Andersens Hus, where in 1805 an ugly duckling named Hans Christian Andersen was born. The world today needs no introduction to this cobbler's son whose fairy stories, published in dozens of tongues, will last as long as there are children to hear them. Andersen did not write them for children, or for money or fame, although the stories brought him both. He wrote them for himself, and Novelist Monica Stirling's tender biography tells...
...Hamp, a young cobbler from Islington, the only survivor of his World War I platoon. He is a prisoner in a dugout cell, waiting to be tried for desertion, while outside rumble the guns of the Passchendaele offensive. Picking his way past a detail that is digging out a flooded latrine comes the officer assigned to defend the deserter: correct, unsmiling Captain Hargreaves...
...Jersey cobbler, Stagg stood 5 ft. 6 in. tall and weighed barely 160 Ibs. when he played end for Yale in 1889 and was named to Walter Camp's first All-America Team. But his real sport then was baseball. Playing both as an undergraduate and graduate student, Stagg pitched Yale to five straight Big Three championships, was offered $4,500 to play for the New York Giants. He turned it down because ballparks had saloons in them and he was studying for the Presbyterian ministry. When a friend told him that he would never be a good public...