Word: essayed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...best example of this kind of attack is Trilling's response to the furor created last spring when her original publisher refused to go ahead with the book unless Trilling removed some remarks about Lillian Hellman in an essay defending American liberals' role in the anticommunist movement of the '50s. (A classic liberal, Trilling considers communism a terrible danger. In a 1967 essay included in this volume, she says the war in Vietnam is a serious error, not because it represents American aggression, but because it is not the best way to stop the Red Menace.) Trilling refused to comply...
...there is a resiliency in the game of baseball which makes it unlikely that the worst of our fears will be realized, and it is the stuff of that toughness that Angell recognizes and celebrates. My favorite essay in the book concerns Max Lapides, Don Shapiro, and Bert Gordon, three middle-aged Jewish diehard fans whose friendship and happiness hinges on the fortunes of the Detroit Tigers. They know literally everything about their team since the '30s--not baseball trivia, as Don explains, because "you can't say 'baseball trivia'...it's a contradiction in terms. It's antithetical." Bert...
...facts and grammar straight. Titled men of letters must be particularly careful. Edmund Wilson audaciously questioned Nabokov's Russian and was mauled by return mail. Critic George Steiner was the victim of one of the neatest decapitations in literary history. Responding to a generously appreciative essay, Nabokov wrote that "Mr. Steiner's article ("Extraterritorial") is built on solid abstractions and opaque generalizations. A few specific items can be made out and should be corrected...
Trilling's subjects range from the student rebellion of 1968 and the burgeonings of the women's movement to the fashion for Portnoy's Complaint and the novels of D.H. Lawrence-and what these books suggest about contemporary sexuality. Her 1964 essay mourning the killing of John F. Kennedy best displays the author's power to summon back events. In the intensity of the national bereavement on that "pitiless weekend," she writes, "Americans moved toward each other, groping for the connection which would dispel loneliness." The hope generated by the Kennedy presidency, as Trilling accurately notes...
...former editor of Horizon magazine, the decade had a chaotic vitality and charm. His title implies a Watergate history, but the book is something quite different-an odd and lovely exercise that is part autobiographical meditation, part elegiac crank letter to the American Republic, part confession and part essay on democratic politics. "I still fuse my public and private worlds," Mee writes. "All visions of the world are autobiographies...