Word: corking
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Michael O'Donovan, Cork-born in 1903, got off the mark so fast that he tried to publish his "collected works" at the age of twelve. Later, having adopted the pseudonym of Frank O'Connor, he published several novels and plays, some verse, a biography of Irish Revolutionary Michael Collins, and a host of short stories that critics have called the best in Ireland since James Joyce's Dubliners. "O'Connor," said the late great William Butler Yeats, "is doing for Ireland what Chekov did for Russia...
Crab Apple Jelly contains a dozen simple, tart tales of the men, women & children of Cork and Kerry. The townsmen - clerks, shopkeepers, shabby priests, students, girls who dream of America - live in a retired world of mahogany cabinets with glass fronts, gilt mirrors with cupids, sets of the History of the Popes, cheap alarm clocks on bedside tables. Snatches of whiskey, poteen or brandy turn them from sighs to smiles in the wink of an eye. Back of them are the old stone farms and grey walls of their childhood-homes huddled away on islands in the middle of lakes...
...half head and half legs ever since. He spends about as much time roving the nation as he spends in Washington. At least two of his reportorial exposes have resulted in Congressional investigations. Last week he was plugging away powerfully and persistently for another-of Thomas G. ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran's reputed influence in the Department of Justice. In 1939 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his leg-&-headwork in uncovering the political prostitution of WPA in Kentucky. This year he won his fellow correspondents' vote as the Washington reporter doing the best all-around job, "measured...
...with his immediate boss, Attorney General Francis Biddle. Worse still, zealous Lawyer Littell got into the habit of denouncing Washington bungling in public. His zeal finally got on the nerves of a formidable array of Old New Dealers, including Harold Ickes, Jesse Jones, Francis Biddle and Tommy ("The Cork") Corcoran, ex-brain-truster turned lawyer-lobbyist...
...Broadway, as a song-& -dance man, Holtz was a flop. He flopped again as a comic until he got the idea of telling his Jewish stories in blackface, clicked in vaudeville, climbed to George White's Scandals. Later Holtz abandoned cork for a cane, made vaudeville history by playing the Palace for ten straight weeks. The stockmarket crash dropped him "from a million to $732"; the decline of vaudeville drove him to pastures new; but after a dozen years of musicomedy, radio, Hollywood, show-producing, real-estate trading, today he has most of his million back...