Word: deadness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When he was young and poor, Irwin Shaw wrote well. His first play, Bury the Dead, was an emblematic work of social- protest theater in the 1930s. His lyrically realistic New Yorker short stories in the same era expanded the form's horizons, and, because he made it look easy -- almost fun -- to be so good, they became inspiring, formative experiences for several generations of writers...
Shaw was betrayed by his own facility. On the night in 1936 that Bury the Dead had its first public performance, he was signing to write his first movie, something called The Big Game. And that was pretty much the way it went with him thereafter. There was nothing he couldn't write, so there was nothing he didn't write. Preoccupied by productivity and the demands of his life- style, he had no time left to develop the guiding vision of self and world a major novelist needs...
...Fumes California State's Robert Eisenman: "We are tired of being treated contemptuously." Behind the scenes, scholars are exchanging bitter private letters and passing around bootlegged photos. What is all the fuss about? The protesters are referring to the long delay in making public many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, those mysterious documents discovered between 1947 and 1956 in caves 20 miles east of Jerusalem. As they see it, the world has long been unnecessarily deprived of data vital to understanding Jewish and Christian history...
...discovery of the scrolls -- 800 ancient Jewish manuscripts that had been hidden from the world for 19 centuries -- was unexpected and dazzling. The Hebrew and Aramaic documents, written mostly on leather, were found in eleven caves along the northwest rim of the Dead Sea. Because of popular fascination over possible connections with Jesus, the Dead Sea Scrolls became the century's most fabled archaeological find...
Within a year, Strugnell and Israel's Elisha Qimron plan to publish one of the most important scrolls, known as the "MMT Letter." The oldest of the nonbiblical scrolls, dating from the mid-2nd century B.C., it spells out disagreements over Jewish law, showing the thinking of the Dead Sea sect at an early stage before it broke with officialdom in Jerusalem. The author might have been the shadowy "Teacher of Righteousness," the sect's presumed founder...