Word: egotist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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AGAIN ! the headlines shouted one day last January, and millions of readers pounced on the latest chapter in the amazing adventures of Ferdinand Waldo ("Fred") Demara Jr., the most spectacular impostor of modern times. A sick, brilliant, 37-year-old alter-egotist who never finished high school, Demara by main nerve and native intelligence has carried off careers as military surgeon, psychology professor, cancer researcher, dean of a school of philosophy, language teacher, law student, assistant prison warden, Trappist monk and the devil knows what else (TIME, Dec. 3, 1951; Feb. 25, 1957). Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this...
...foolish in conception as it was heroic in outcome. Both ends of the scale were weighted by heavy-jawed Sir Ernest ("The Boss'') Shackleton, who in 1909 had gone to within 97 miles of the South Pole. Shackleton had one trouble: he was a towering egotist. As an apprentice in the British merchant navy, he was termed "the most pigheaded, obstinate boy I have ever come across" by his first skipper. Born a middle-class Irishman, he burned to force his way to the top of Britain's upper crust-and chose the polar route...
Morris was vaguely disturbed by all this brooding on craft. He was disturbed by the intellectual exercises of imitating ancient forms by the thriceweekly traipses through the scholastic limbo of image-source and word derivation. Of course Morris was an egotist, and he awoke occasionally at midnight with the ugly thought: "What if I'm being disciplined out of existence...
Morris was vaguely disturbed by all this brooding on craft. He was disturbed by the intellectual exercises of imitating ancient forms, by the thrice-weekly traipses through the scholastic limbo of image-source and word derivation. Of course, Morris was an egotist, and he awoke occasionally at midnight with the ugly thought: "What if I'm being disciplined out of existence...
...Belgian Congo. Its protagonist Kurtz is a portrait of a man whose pure will-to-power has squandered itself hopelessly. In the epigraph to The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot saluted this defeat: "Mistah Kurtz?he dead," quoted Eliot, recognizing that no man is more hollow than the defeated egotist...