Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Malcolm Cowley became interested in politics, but the Communists had in the meantime preempted the positions of radical social protest. As the instances of Dreiser and Dos Passos show, they were not able to make any cultural use of their pre-eminence. The American intelligentsia turned left in the grim years between '28 and '32, but the Party was never able to adapt itself to it. It was not simply that Marxism produced no literary criticism worth printing, though that was true enough; but even the social criticism of the American Left during the '30's came from men like...
...writes Héléne. So Héléne returns to her fiancé, body unseduced but mind converted to an abort-as-you-go philosophy of premarital sex. Author Vailland, 54, can be both tough and mordant, as he brilliantly proved in The Law, a grim parable of the jostling hierarchies and jealousies in an Italian village. In Turn of the Wheel, written nine years earlier, his feuding couple are too clearly only paper marionettes, spitting out and dissecting the axioms that he puts into their mouths...
...writer of last Wednesday's editorial. "Tutorial and the English Department." If our program were anything like that which he describes, we would also share his distaste for it. "The grand era of Harvard education," in which he thinks the Department still lives, must have been pretty grim indeed--a dark stronghold of nineteenth century philology, clanking with cumbersome internal machinery and populated with tutors who peeped surreptitiously at their students' latest rank-listing before deciding how many more scholarly secrets they might legally administer...
...more future in the infant electric industry. In eight years he had married and had a good position as a wiring inspector. But again he quit, scraping together $97.50 to start a tiny business making an electric socket he had designed. It failed miserably ("It was a grim year. I had to pawn my wife's kimono"), but he struggled along with subcontract work until he developed an electrical attachment plug that could be sold for 30% less than his competitors' plugs. By the time he was 27, he was a success...
...clans known as zaibatsu-concentrated on building Japan's industrial and military power at forced draft. The policy was in part highly successful-until World War II, Japan was the only Asian nation that had never been colonized or dominated by a Western power-but it cost a grim price. Like Communist China today, prewar Japan built its strength on the sweat of its people, had no surplus to spare for decent living conditions...