Word: great
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Although Mencken shared the fate of the successful satirist-to perish with his enemies-he had fun, while he could, slaying philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Mencken added to the gaiety of nations; he was a great man with a custard pie. Puritanism, the genteel tradition in fiction, Prohibition and even that "Bible of the booboisie and boost-erism"-the Saturday Evening Post -all became his targets...
...denudation of America's Sunday-go-to-meeting image was carried out with wit and a once admired prose style. Harold Ross of The New Yorker said that he was "the most enlightened man writing today." That praise now seems a shade inconsequential-as if a potentially great pianist had squandered his digital gifts as a pinball virtuoso. In truth, Mencken worked hard at his prose but had the autodidact's fatal fondness for the fancy word. As for the flowers of wit culled by Carl Bode, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, they have...
...violence. "People don't want to be rescued," he says. They want to be saved, and salvation is what Clancy's charges uniquely promise: doom and salvation in one package. As Eastlake sardonically puts it: "History is a record of people committing suicide . . . Death is the great problem solver...
...decided to stay at the corner, because the whole block was already jammed with people, all kinds of people milling about, just as if we were all spectators at some great circus and the canvas was about to collapse all about us, but nobody quite knew how to panic. There was simply no way to characterize the crowd; the militants must have all been up front because they didn't seem to be in evidence. In the midst of everybody else was a button-hawker with a large, black-felt-covered board, dotted with all colors and sizes of peace...
...dear, dumb, gentle reader, if you're still with me after days and days of CRIMSON elegies on Washington marches, as well as rafts of my own ruptured prose, you're about to hear of the great odyssey that gave meaning to the whole weekend...