Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...what was happening now in the northwest,. where the sky on past nights had been lit with pale flashes of gunfire. Over a radio improvised from scraps and toothpaste tubes they had caught fragmentary reports. They knew that MacArthur-who would "always seem to see the vision of the grim, gaunt, and ghostly men"-must have returned. Inside their bamboo and barbed-wire stockade, they thought with mixed hope and despair of their own chances of escape...
...Nazis denounced him as a traitor, reportedly put his family in a concentration camp. Grim Paulus stood firm. Last week he was still broadcasting to Germany for the Russians...
...focal character of most Thurber-prose and drawings is a reticent, befuddled, thwarted little man who tries sadly to preserve himself and his reason against a practically worldwide onslaught. Grim psychiatrists, gadgets that "whir and whine and whiz," erratic servants, domineering women, unfriendly dogs, ghosts, foreigners -all are in league to crush the Thurber Male. This harried biped, like Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Mann's Hans Castorp, represents 20th-century Man. To Thurber's devotees, who rate him the greatest U.S. humorist since Mark Twain, his blankly exaggerated reports of their own qualms and misadventures...
...stupidity and cowardice and self-love-as any American writer of his time. The knowledge pervades his lightest work; and in one small corner of his world, in such stories as The Cane in the Corridor and The Breaking Up of the Winship, evil unmasks itself in grim tragedy...
...soldiers overseas, rotation (periodic furloughs home) is one of the grim jokes of the war. Homesick G.I.s stuck in New Guinea for the past two years recently composed their own G.I. version of eligibility "for relief via rotation...