Word: devoto
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...pigs and three Stooges. And after tonight, there will have been three Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra subscription concerts. Perhaps coincidentally, conductor Maestro James Yannatos will lead the Orchestra as they play Pistons Symphony No. 3 as well as Don Juan by Strauss. But wait. That's not all. Professor Mark Devoto and Professor Emeritus Eliot Forbes will give a pre-concert lecture. Sanders Theatre. Tickets 496-2222. Concert at 8 p.m., lecture at 7 p.m. $8-$13 general, $6-$10 for students...
Like Stegner, DeVoto was a Harvardman who left the West as soon as he decently could. He joined the faculty at Breadloaf Writers' Conference, beginning in 1932. He was briefly editor of the Saturday Review, and for two decades the occupant of the Harper's magazine column called "The Easy Chair." He lectured at Harvard and lived in a gabled house in Cambridge, Mass., that featured an enormous paneled library behind sliding doors. There, in his later years, he and his wife Avis, a student during his young teaching days at Northwestern, entertained the John Kenneth Galbraiths...
...DeVoto always felt himself an outsider. He was a compulsive worker who produced more than 230 magazine pieces before he was 40-plus four novels, a volume of essays and the book that made his reputation, Mark Twain's America. He was capable of hacking out 30,000 words in a fecund week of writing romantic serial fiction for the Saturday Evening Post under the pen name "John August," scribbling in panic before the "manias, depression and blue funks" as well as the living expenses that pursued him. (DeVoto had a fondness for domestic help, new Buicks and private...
Stegner believes that the quintessential DeVoto was DeVoto the polemicist. He railed against censors, education-school pedagogues, the Old Left and the New Critics (whom he called simply "the boys"). He was a growling consumer advocate who made long lists of things that didn't work, including kitchen knives, portable typewriters and processed cheese ("unfit even to bait mice with"). He fought for conservation before anybody knew there was a fight...
...DeVoto always in such an uproar? Edmund Wilson once asked, genuinely puzzled. Part of the answer is that DeVoto-to use an almost obsolete word for an almost obsolete species -was a curmudgeon. It is Stegner's finest instinct that he does not try to make his curmudgeon correct-just very necessary...