Word: despondence
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...American people, the astronauts' triumph came as a particularly welcome gift after a year of disruption and despond. Seldom had the nation been confronted with such a congeries of doubts and discontents. On their TV screens, Americans had watched in horror as Martin Luther King lay dead on a Memphis balcony and as an assassin's bullet pierced Robert Kennedy's brain in Los Angeles. While U.S. prestige declined abroad, the nation's own self-confidence sank to a nadir at which it became a familiar litany that American society was afflicted with some profound malaise...
Although he also opposed Humphrey before Chicago, George McGovern refused to retreat into despond. After he and the remnants of Bobby Kennedy's doves were outvoted in Chicago, McGovern quickly joined Humphrey on the convention podium. And while preoccupied with his own successful campaign for re-election to the Senate from South Dakota, he managed to keep on good terms with all factions of the splintered Democratic Party...
Most good journalists sooner or later find a beat that pleases them above all others. Joan Didion's territory is a bleak and joyless neverland located somewhere between Despond and Nostalgia. Under her melancholy eye, even the most familiar people and places take on an air of tragedy. Things seem to be falling apart, and the atmosphere is mournfully laden with unrealized dreams and memories of lost innocence...
...poorest in the nation, where according to the latest census eight out of every ten families live below the poverty line, 37% of the households own washing machines, 48% own cars, and 52% own television sets. In the Los Angeles district of Watts, California's most notorious Slough of Despond, the orderly rows of one-story, stucco houses reflect the sun in gay pastels, and only the weed-grown gaps between stores along the wide main streets?"instant parking lots"?hint at the volcanic mob fury that three years ago erupted out of poverty to take 34 lives...
...pilgrimage from innocence to experience, or from the provinces to the city or from despair to salvation, is one of the more thoroughly traveled, heavily rutted highways of English fiction. John Bunyan drew up the road map-the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, Doubting Castle-but British Novelist David Benedictus' second book is far from Bunyanesque. At its zany best it is more reminiscent of the wonderfully erratic pilgrimage to London of young Sam Bennet in Dylan Thomas' Adventures in the Skin Trade...