Word: gripings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...delighted to read your Dec. 24 article on Johns Hopkins' Robert Williams Wood. It gives me the opportunity to air a slight but persistent gripe concerning, of all things, the current Ethyl gasoline advertisements carried by some pretty estimable magazines: "There's a big difference between holly and a polly," etc. This is a direct steal from Professor Wood's charming (and far cleverer) . . . The Antelope-The Cantelope...
...like Truman Capote, William Styron and Frederick Buechner are precocious technicians, but their books have the air of suspecting that life is long on treachery, short on rewards. What some critics took for healthy revolt in James Jones's From Here to Eternity was really a massively reiterated gripe against life. But Jones is not the only young writer to wallow in a world of seemingly private resentments. Most of his fellow writers suffer from what has become their occupational disease: belief that disappointment is life's only certainty. The young writers of the '205 were...
...Another gripe was the refrigerators. All refrigerators in the project are gas, and sit directly below wooden cabinets. Several occupants claim that the exhaust has been so hot they were forced to put asbestos pads on the cabinet bottoms...
...Caine Mutiny, Novelist Herman Wouk (Aurora Dawn, The City Boy) has tackled a problem of considerably greater moment than those confronted by the personal-gripe, crushed-sensitive-youth school of U.S. war novelists (Norman Mailer, James Jones). What, he asks in effect, is of first consequence: the sprinkling of nasty little Queegs and the irritations suffered by their subordinates, or the good sense and steady drive of the Willie Keiths in the face of pressures they had never expected to meet...
National Guardsmen and regular soldiers had another special and startling gripe of their own. Under the present snafued pension laws, noted the Army Times, an Army or Air Force Reserve captain killed in Korea would leave a pension of $331.80 a month to his widow and two children; a Regular Army or National Guard captain killed by the same shellburst would leave his dependents a pension of only $130 a month. Reason: reservists come under the same pension laws as civilian employees of the Government; regulars and guardsmen (as well as all Marine and Navy personnel with more than...