Word: gifts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...which a Briton can aspire. Membership is restricted to 24 British subjects and is granted directly by the Crown. That honor was fittingly bestowed last week on Novelist-Humanist E. M. Forster (A Passage to India) on the eve of his 90th birthday. The sage celebrated birthday and royal gift quietly with friends, then returned to King's College, Cambridge, where he has lived as an Honorary Fellow since 1946. Age has not dulled his gentle wit. Asked if he would not some day want his death to be commemorated in King's Chapel, he replied...
...produced only some 160 paintings, left most of them unfinished and parted with few. Strangely enough, the world's largest collection of completed Ryders was stashed away for years (from 1929) in the storerooms and corridors of Washington's Smithsonian Institution. Seventeen of the 18 were the gift of a New Yorker named John Gellatly, an eccentric who had the wit to marry money and the eye to pick Ryder as the American painter who could hold his own with the Europeans. In a final exuberance, Gellatly gave his whole $5,000,000 collection to the Smithsonian, leaving...
...American people, the astronauts' triumph came as a particularly welcome gift after a year of disruption and despond. Seldom had the nation been confronted with such a congeries of doubts and discontents. On their TV screens, Americans had watched in horror as Martin Luther King lay dead on a Memphis balcony and as an assassin's bullet pierced Robert Kennedy's brain in Los Angeles. While U.S. prestige declined abroad, the nation's own self-confidence sank to a nadir at which it became a familiar litany that American society was afflicted with some profound malaise...
Critic Alfred Kazin suggests that "at bottom Steinbeck's gift was not so much a literary resource as a distinctively harmonious and pacific view of life. The Depression naturalists saw life as one vast Chicago slaughterhouse, a guerrilla war, a perpetual bombing raid. Steinbeck had picked up a refreshing belief in human fellowship and courage: he had learned to accept the rhythm of life...
...novels, The Grapes of Wrath was the strongest and most durable. It suffered from the flaws that Critic Maxwell Geismar found in much of his writing: "Simplification has been the source of his inspiration. Handling complex material rather too easily, he has been marked by the popularizing gift. Here is an urbanity of psyche bought a little easily." His eighth novel, the book was published in 1939, after Steinbeck made the westward pilgrimage with a caravan of Oklahoma farmers. Part exposé, part tract, Grapes was a concentration of Steinbeck's artistic and moral vision...