Word: decameron
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...been one of the great wholesale man-killers of history. Ancient Greece and Rome were helpless against it. In the 14th Century it killed 25 million in Europe, probably another 25 million in China and India. Boccaccio used the plague in Florence as a backdrop and excuse for his Decameron; 300 years later Pepys noted in his Diary many a detail of London's famed plague of 1665. One or two cases a year still show...
Wrote Sullivan in PM: "A man who has swiped [these] books, and has read them, is on the road to . . .a liberal education." Some of the books Union men had borrowed for keeps: Andersen's and Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jane Eyre, The Decameron, Wuthering Heights, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Chesterfield's Letters, Art in the Armed Forces, Moll Flanders, Crime and Punishment, A Farewell to Arms, Isherwood's Prater Violet, Sons and Lovers, Up Front, Eugene O'Neill's Plays, The Portable Dorothy Parker, Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Villon's Poems...
...sort of Oriental Decameron, Chin P'ing Mei tells the story of a rich young rakehell named Hsi Men, of whom it was said that "unless they are concubines of the Prince of Hell himself, they belong to the harem of wealthy Hsi Men." Fretful because he is not ten men, something of a sadist (though a pleasant fellow at times), Hsi is figuratively said to enjoy "spending his nights among blossoms and willows." The details are put much more plainly...
...Civil War, in Vienna after Anschluss, in Paris as an exile, it is actually a series of very moderately intelligent travel and political notes, held together by stock characters, decorated by eroticisms, seasoned with high-school cynicism, anger, iconoclastic irony. Net effect: like a drugstore translation of the Decameron by Weber & Fields...