Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Author. A lady at the glittering Japanese court of the 11th Century, Murasaki Shikibu was a shrewd observer of life in the capital. Up to her time fiction had taken the form of short fairy tales and allegories; her 4,000-page novel was a distinct innovation, the first attempt at realism. Some say she was called Murasaki after the heroine of her famous tale; others (among them Amy Lowell) say that the Mikado whose favorite she was wrote her a poem: "When the purple grass (Murasaki) is in full color one can scarcely perceive the other plants...
...Ellis, distressed by his own patchy understanding of the complicated sex impulse, vowed he would save other youth from similar distress, and devoted his life to elucidation. With this end always in mind, his studies ranged from ten years' medical practice to wide reading of philosophy, history, and fiction, recorded in his six volumes of annotated quotations-Taine, Swinburne, Flaubert, Strauss, Voltaire, Boccaccio, Whitman...
...carried to the deck and helped through a crowd of frightened passengers to his stateroom. His name is Morton McMichael Hoyt; his wife is Jeanne Bankhead, sister to Tallulah; his brother, Henry M. Hoyt Jr., had committed suicide eight years ago; his sisters are Nancy Hoyt, writer of sophisticated fiction (Roundabout, Unkind Star), and Elinor Wylie, poetess (Nets to Catch the Wind), novelist (Jennifer Lorn). No one could guess precisely why Morgan Hoyt should have wished to leave the bright ship and the people who were chatting on the deck...
During the convention, Secretary Mellon and Boss Vare sat side by side in the front row. They chatted together, sometimes laughed together. Perhaps they were patching things up. Perhaps they really like one another. Perhaps the Vare-Mellon rivalry is a fiction. Perhaps there are simple explanations of what happened in Kansas City: that Boss Vare, a contractor, heartily admired Candidate Hoover, an engineer; that Secretary Mellon, a cautious financier, wanted to explore every contingency before shifting from the Coolidge investment to the Hoover; that Vare, a blunt creature, saw no sense in waiting longer; that Mellon, alive to subtleties...
...Call it searing the conscience, call it dimming the moral sight, call it what you will, the process, in greater or less degree, is not confined to fiction. Men have started in life with good intentions and ended reprobates. When the catastrophy comes in such cases. When, for example; an embezzlement is discovered, a long series of gradually increasing malversations appear, beginning with a self-pretence of borrowing money to be replaced, growing by degrees more reckless and ending in desperation. All along there is a series also of excuses causing the edge of the conscience to become gradually dulled...