Word: genteelness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Mary Roberts Rinehart, 82, genteel, hard-working novelist and mystery writer, whose 60 books (written over 46 years) sold more than 11 million copies; of a heart ailment; in Manhattan. Growing up in Allegheny, Pa., Mary Roberts studied to be a nurse, then married Surgeon Stanley Rinehart in 1896, bore three sons before she was 27. She wrote The Circular Staircase, first of her warmly human, quietly humorous mysteries, after a stock-market panic in 1903 threw the Rinehart family $12,000 in debt. When Staircase sold (1,250,000 copies so far), she went on writing, reached...
Retreating to New York City, the general bore his last years of genteel poverty lightly. Natty and erect to the day of his death in 1899, the aging Milton Littlefield invariably wore a flower in his lapel. It was the only thing anyone ever pinned on the prince of carpetbaggers...
...transcendentalist, Thoreau saw spirit at the heart of matter. But he was never so genteel as to gag at reality. "Let a man reserve a good appetite for his peck of dirt," he wrote, "and expect his chief wealth in unwashed diamonds." At 23, Thoreau was already grappling with the central dilemma of his life, how to know himself and be himself under the raised eyebrow of conformist society: "It is always easy to infringe the law-but the Bedouins of the desert find it impossible to resist public opinion...
...Thin Man (Fri. 9:30 p.m., E.D.T., NBC). Though his own private eye is often trained on blondes, Nick Charles (Peter Lawford) has a pert wife named Nora (Phyllis Kirk) to whom he is professedly faithful, and a wire-haired terrier named Asta who is faithful to him. Genteel and wryly suave, Nick seldom tangles physically with the blackmailers, assassins and sundry evildoers whom he ferrets out with one hand while reaching for a martini with the other. He rarely finishes a drink during the half-hour program, giving the impression that he is a frustrated alcoholic...
...suits than Brooks Brothers. The novel's key setting is Pine Island, Me., a summer retreat and a kind of "perverted Garden of Eden from which one was expelled for the sin of poverty." Among the unexpelled nouveau poor are the Hunters, who eke out their stay as genteel innkeepers. Fortyish Bart Hunter is an existentially minded drunkard whose most cutting insult is to call someone "cheerful." His disillusioned wife Sylvia once took him for a big social cheese, but now knows him for an ineffectual mouse. Their son John, a taut, brooding boy of 14, and his nondescript...