Word: genteelism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Author Dunham writes movingly but without bitterness about the struggle of the children to break free of the father, and about the genteel shabbiness of lower-middle-class Negro life. A set piece on the well-calculated emotionalism of a Bible-banging preacher could hardly be done better. And the reader feels sharply Katherine's humiliation and despair when her neurotically protective father insists on being her dancing partner at parties. For violence and despair, the Dunham family wars approach Eugene O'Neill's. When the last blow has been struck-backhanded, across the mouth-and Katherine...
Stuart Symington's will to victory traces back to a special kind of poverty that he endured in childhood-not the numbing poverty of the slum poor but the stinging poverty of the semi-broke genteel. At the time of Stu's birth, his father was a teacher of Romance languages at Massachusetts' Amherst College. But he soon quit as a result of a quarrel with the college president, moved his family to New York, where he studied law at night, scraping a living by translating documents for export-import firms. A few years later, the family...
...McCarthy Florence bears almost no resemblance to that of the Brownings, of "Old maids of both sexes, retired librarians, governesses, ladies with reduced incomes," who, in the Victorian era, gave it the tone of a genteel rest home. This is the city whose people "invented the Renaissance, which is the same as saying that they invented the modern world-not, of course, an unmixed good." Its great artists-Michelangelo, Leonardo, Cellini-wrought wonders in a time of bloody political and family feuds such as history has seldom seen. Murders were committed at the very altar; homosexuality was a passion shared...
...Glass Menagerie has nearly no plot (first the Gentleman Caller is awaited, then he is there, then he is gone); it is all futility and grief in a shabby-genteel apartment, where Amanda, a woman uprooted from her way of life, her daughter Laura, who knows nearly no one and fears everyone she does not know, and Laura's restless brother Tom, try to escape their cul-de-sac, and help one another out of it, in every way they can. Uniquely, perhaps, among Tennessee Williams' major works, this one has no dominating masculine figure to bring...
...detailed information on who was calling on the Shelleys in Pisa and who was snubbing them in Rome. Of the atmosphere in Europe that perhaps called the poets into being and that was certainly given a whole new range of colors by them, there is little in this genteel biography. In her account, Author Bigland has cruelly caged two skylarks and they do not sing...