Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like the swimming test Mrs. Widener demanded and the Polaroid camera shape of the Science Center, the steam tunnels are a part of Harvard legend. A cloudy mixture of fiction and fact, their dimensions expand with each prankster's tale and their history grows more fantastic. One story tells of a sly undergraduate who, dressed as a workman, avoided the winter snows by travelling to classes through the tunnels. During the 1969 occupation of University Hall, another rumor has it, Harvard administrators escaped invading protesters by fleeing through the underground passages. Once upon a time, the wrestling team jogged through...
...years. Knowing this is one thing; finding and reading the stories has been something else again. Over the decades, magazines carrying Cheever's stories fluttered past, destined for the attic or remote stacks in public libraries. At intervals, hardbound collections of some of Cheever's short fiction appeared, sold tastefully and then went out of print. A few pieces survived the drift toward transiency to which most stories are prone: The Enormous Radio became a standard inclusion in fiction anthologies; The Swimmer inspired an inadequate Hollywood film. The continued existence of other tales, though, came to depend chiefly...
...neck. Black magic is here, as well as the redemptive kind, and in explicable happiness can be every bit as astonishing as inexplicable misery. Cheever has never tried more or less than to get this sense of mystery down. At the end of one story, he wonders how mere fiction could "hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream." As consistently as any of his contemporaries, Cheever has done just that...
...radiator." Perceptions noted, then brushed aside, only to return again, create the underlying rhythm of their days, until Marcia's mental backslide brings a sharper focus. Pym charts the courses of these blameless lives, informing them with a wise, rueful compassion that is all too rare in contemporary fiction...
Jack Kerouac did not write reportage, he wrote fiction. He had a memory for detail and the abstract which earned him Holmes's affectionate epitaph. Above all, Kerouac applied a new, rhapsodic prose form to the old story of a young man's crazy adventures...