Word: despairing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...little better able to care for the children they will have, than their parents were to care for them-lest the generations of those maimed in childhood, each making the next in its own image, create upon the darkness, like mirrors locked face to face, an infinite corridor of despair...
...became interested in girls, the baker's daughter cordially offered "to show him the mysteries which he had hitherto dared only to dream about." At another point, when he was worried about his sexual adequacy, a college girl enticed him into intimate relations. In the depths of his despair and humiliation women suddenly appeared from nowhere-they were his for the asking, and no one he had the courage to approach seems to have refused him. When he was growing seriously ill in Chicago, a former high-school teacher "unaccountably appeared with the proposal that he spend the following...
...efforts at writing fiction gave him years of discouragement. When his publishers suppressed the first printing of Sister Carrie as "immoral" in 1900 he began a period of despair, ending in such poverty that he rented a $1.25-a-week room, lived on a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread a day. "A strange half-wakefulness soon came over him, during which he wandered about confused and uncertain as to what he actually was. He sometimes regarded himself as two persons ... At night, frequently, he imagined there was an intruder creeping about the room ..." Down to his last...
...dishevelled, drunken, and discouraged Negro MP sprawled on a pile of rubble wistfully playing his harmonica for an Italian urchin. He falls asleep, and the boy steals his shoes. Waking, the MP chases the child to its bombed-out home, where, confronted by the sight of utter poverty and despair, he can only turn and flee back to the city, leaving his shoes and his anger behind in the ruins...
...girl glamor. In even the best of these, the deranged mind was merely held up as an interesting object to look at. "The Snake Pit," however, void of all hints of Hollywood glamor, achieves the startling effect of entering the diseased mind and reflecting its horrors and fears--its despair in groping in darkness for a ray of light. The mind is not exhibited but analyzed; the audience not merely understands it but feels its tensions. These powerful effects are achieved without off-focus blurs, mad music, or tilting rooms, but with fine direction and expert acting. The one photographic...