Word: countryman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...book with observations on cooking, dressing, neighborliness, forest fires, fishing, customs, communications. But she has no scorn for city dwellers: "In spite of the literary convention of bursting barns, overflowing larders, and cellars crammed with luscious preserves and delicious smoked hams, in spite of the accepted version of the countryman as being clad in the warmest and best of wools . . . the country standard of living is very much lower than the city standard...
...Japanese had plenty of tanks and artillery; the Chinese had no tanks, almost no artillery from Chiang Kai-shek's meager stocks in China. They had to fight with rifles, pistols, light machine guns. Sometimes the Chinese called out to the Japs: "Lao hsiang (old countryman), don't fight!" But the Japs fought...
...sadness on his features, he began: "Nothing, nothing, nothing can paralyze the Populares' task. I will be here while I have an ounce of energy. . . ." He said that if he could not attend, his mother could take his place. If anything happened to her, he said, the humblest countryman in the island could step forward and carry on the task. But Muñoz Marin could not assign to anybody else the promise that his followers found in him while he was warning them to have no faith in the promises of politicians, including himself...
...original Southern type, "the core about which most Southerners of whatever degree were likely to be built," Cash selects not the aristocrat but the "backcountry pioneer farmer," the descendant not of English squires but of "half-wild Scotch and Irish clansmen." This countryman's outstanding trait was his lack of complexity. A direct product of the soil, he was "as simple a type as Western civilization has produced in modern times." To that intense simplicity, Cash assigns several Southern traits: individualism, puerility, a tendency to violence, romanticism, hedonism, piety, a passionate love of rhetoric and of politics...
Romains' countryman, Andre Malraux, achieved in Man's Fate (1934), a story of the 1927 Chinese civil war, a more vivid and at times more exalted work of dramatic craftsmanship than Verdun. But Malraux was working within far narrower limits, in what physicists by analogy might call a closed field-more exotic, more melodramatic, less austere than Romains'. John Dos Passes' ambitious trilogy of pre-War to post-War U. S. A. appears nearer to Romains' in scope, but his great powers of narrative and evocation are spent on a host of minor characters...