Word: dos
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...Eliot, Robert Frost, John Dos Passos, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell. All these literary luminaries went to Harvard but none majored in Option III, the creative writing program within the English concentration. Of course, they were all here well before the advent of the option a short five years ago, but even if they had had the opportunity to apply for admission to the highly selective program, one might wonder if any of the above writers would have been accepted...
...difference between us and you, in my opinion, is this: In a period when certain means we had all agreed upon for emancipating the working class, and therewith all society, have proved to lead in the opposite direction, we have remained loyal to the aim, you to the means." Dos Passos despised Communism for the same reason he hated corporate capitalism--he detested organization and bureaucracy. He ended up yearning for a misty Jeffersonian order of agrarian individualism. Herberg's conversion was religious in nature, and the most enigmatic of all. Burnham, like Eastman, rejected the "scientific" claims of Marxism...
...four men during their radical years was their inability to accept the whole of the Marxist conception of the world. None of them were convinced of the validity of Marx's interpretation of history, which Marx regarded as central to his entire construction. They had other doubts--Burnham and Dos Passos about the role of art, Herberg about the existence of objective, material reality, Eastman about Marx's epistemology, among others. If there is a single explanation for their conversions, it is that each man began with substantive disagreements with Marx and only gradually worked out the logic of their...
DIGGINS HAS PROVIDED a lucid and accurate intellectual biography of Eastman, Herberg, Dos Passos and Burnham, as well as a useful picture of the temper of the age in which they lived. If his interpretation of the reasons for their conversions is faulty, his book nonetheless presents a complete picture of the material facts. If Diggins fails, it is because he ignores his own evidence, and because he prefers a neat, all-encompassing solution to a more complex and perhaps less satisfying...
More often than not, Diggins prefers the easy, superficial one-liner to the serious argument. He quotes Edmund Wilson's succinct and moronic explanation of Dos Passos' conversion: "On account of Soviet Knavery/He favors restoring slavery." and asks "Fair or foul?" The reader can almost hear Diggins giggling in self-satisfied delight. Elsewhere he is simply pretentious. In an account of Buckley's attempts to reconcile Catholic theology with free-market economic precepts, Diggins intones solemnly, "Indeed conservatism, capitalism, and Christianity present an impossible synthesis." His penchant for constant alliteration, even when it requires the use of inappropriate words...