Word: genteelism
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Sprawled on the steep east bank of the Hudson River, 70 miles above Manhattan Poughkeepsie is more accustomed to the genteel antics of Vassar College girls than to the annual turbulence of a college rowing race. Since it started in 1895, the Poughkeepsie Regatta has become the biggest, the most important of the year. The succession of races has been interrupted only twice: first during the War, again last year when few of the participating colleges felt they could afford to send boats Last week, the river was again filled with big shiny yachts; excursion craft, canoe; and launches...
...street. unaware that they were missing a feast, might have pointed out more than one reason for the genteel hullabaloo. Thomas Mann is a Nobel Prizewinner (1929). This was his first visit to the U. S. Hitler's victims, if sufficiently presentable, are popular in Manhattan. Author Mann brings no topsy-turvy social message; even a banker is safe in his company. Though some of his books have been best-sellers in Germany, his finespun writing will never appeal to the U. S. masses. But the man-in-the-street, more than half right about the smokescreen, would have...
...Shining Hour (by Keith Winter; Max Gordon, producer). The first act of The Shining Hour is devoted to limning the Linden family, genteel Yorkshire farmers. The Lindens are excited by foxes, foals, jigsaw puzzles. They live in such smothering juxtaposition that any disturbance is likely to upset the whole family...
...Henry Wetter Jr. breathed easier when they reached Grand Central Station and found no policemen waiting for them. They went to a cheap Times Square hotel, the Bradley House, registered as "Norman Thompson" and "John Adams." Next day, clad in sweaters so they would not look too genteel, they traveled up & down the Hudson River waterfront as cocky and tough as could be. They walked what seemed like 30 miles but people did not seem to want cabin boys any more. Most of the sea captains chuckled roughly, told them to run along home. Nearest they came to getting jobs...
...sectionalists, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Eggleston and Cable, did not comprehend the whole. The fugitives, Sarah, Orne Jewett, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, sought sanctuary in trifling worlds of their own. William Dean Howells sounded the right note, but was too limited in experience and ability to be successful. The genteel writers of the nineties merely catered to bourgeois prejudices. Then came the years of hope, the years of progressivism and the muckrakers; but journalism was not literature, and recognition of evils was no substitute for recognition of fundamental problems...