Word: essayist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shine all the time, but now and then a nonpareil comes along who puts on a good show of inexhaustible radiance. America lost one such rare soul last week when James Merrill died of a heart attack at the age of 68. He was a novelist, an essayist and a playwright, but it's as a poet-the author of 11 volumes of verse, with a 12th forthcoming in March-that he made his ineradicable mark...
...told me, half jokingly, he was tired of seeing his face on television," says Roger Rosenblatt, a NewsHour essayist and editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. At a meeting with NewsHour staff members last * week, MacNeil explained frankly that besides his personal desire to leave daily journalism, financial factors played an important role in his thinking. Though the show, now seen on more than 300 stations, has increased its audience 40% in the past nine years, it has seen its budget fall from $26 million to under $25 million this year, and its corporate funding from $13 million...
John Waters understands. For a quarter-century, the 47-year-old filmmaker has been America's pre-eminent satirist of domestic depravity. He is also an elegant comic essayist, who puckishly wrote in 1985 that killing a celebrity is "the only sure-fire route to overnight front-page fame." And he is a connoisseur of the judicially sensational, attending many a grotesque trial. Waters can sagely note the media's glamorizing and merchandising of felony -- "These days you can commit a crime, and two weeks later it's a TV movie" -- and in the next breath give a rave review...
...traditional metaphor for this is that of a mosaic. But Richard Rodriguez, the Mexican-American essayist who is a psalmist for our new hybrid forms, points out that the interaction is more fluid than that, more human, subject to daily revision. "I am Chinese," he says, "because I live in San Francisco, a Chinese city. I became Irish in America. I became Portuguese in America." And even as he announces this new truth, Portuguese women are becoming American, and Irishmen are becoming Portuguese, and Sydney (or is it Toronto?) is thinking to compare itself with the "Chinese city" we know...
...Hosokawa clan ruled southwestern Japan from the 16th to the mid-19th century and produced important historical figures, including the father and son Yusai (1534-1610) and Tadaoki (1563-1646), who prospered under all three military rulers who unified Japan. The new Prime Minister "makes people feel history," says essayist Yoshimi Ishikawa. "Everyone can participate in discussions about his family...