Word: craning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Died. Crane Brinton, 70, longtime (1923-68) Harvard history professor, whose books on Western political thought, and particularly on revolution (A Decade of Revolution: 1789-99, Nietzsche), proved him a master in his field; after a long illness; in Cambridge, Mass. One of the most popular of contemporary historians, Brinton was also one of the most perceptive. In The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), a study of four major upheavals, from the English rebellion of 1640 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, he spelled out his now-familiar theory that revolutions stem from hope not despair, from the promises of progress...
...Crane gloated too soon. Although he scribbled furiously all of his short life (twelve volumes of novels, poems, sketches, short stories), none of his later works ever remotely approached the success of The Red Badge, written before he had ever heard a shot fired in anger. When he died of tuberculosis in a German sanatorium on June 5, 1900, not yet 29, he was destitute and had been begging money from his literary friends, including Henry James and Joseph Conrad. His brother had to pay to have his body brought home to New Jersey for burial. It was the sort...
...Crane was patently a born rebel who delighted in scandalizing his age. But the clearest-and most surprising-picture that emerges from Stallman's meticulous fact-finding is that Crane was not the starving garret poet of popular legend. At his peak, he was well-paid. Convivial and generous, he virtually gave his money away. He was lionized as a celebrity when most of his contemporaries had scarcely finished college. But he was also a frail and sickly young man, and he did have a presentiment that his life-span would be short. He labored desperately to get down...
Mystical Dream. Crane was also a serious writer whose only compulsion was to portray life honestly. At his best, he wrote a bold, uncluttered, staccato prose that, like the young Hemingway's, eventually changed both the rhythm and content of American fiction. At the core of that achievement was The Red Badge of Courage, that wholly intuitive, almost mystical dream of war dredged up from his subconscious when he was only...
...Perhaps Crane's greatest misfortune was to be born in the U.S. of the 1890s. In a later, more generous age, he could undoubtedly have earned enough money to live well-probably even enough to keep his devoted but high-living mistress in style in the English manor house they occupied before his last illness. As it was, when the tree-blasting lightning struck, he went placidly and obediently, his dog Sponge at his bedside, fully aware, as Willa Gather once said, that "all his life was a preparation for sudden departure...