Word: hack
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Eliza has made her precarious way across the ice, strewing her wake with the pillows that gave her the necessary embonpoint. The buzz-saw has ceased to hack at the disheveled hair of the fainted heroine, and the villain, with a furious gesture, has gone to meet his Maker. Gone are the thrillers and the tragedies and mysteries that held audiences tense for every moment of their diurnal span. Gone indeed, but the tradition seems to linger...
...Reservation, sixty miles west of Topeka. At the age of nine he turns up in the white man's end of Kansas as a jockey, riding races at the county fairs. At the age of seventeen Curtis left the track and got a job driving a hack in Topeka. By day he went to school. By night he drove his cab. Forming a friendship with a lawyer, he became interested in the law, and studied in his small spare time...
...year ago the hack-writers who produce "true stories" and "confessions" were told by their employers to "lay off the sex stuff." This applied chiefly to seductions and attempted seductions. A cleaner substitute was wanted, partly because of fear of censorship, but essentially because public taste was changing. Heart throbs, steadfast virtue, outdoor heroes, wholesome homes, human interest stories were selling like hotdogs at a horse race. They became the order...
...dignity of an academic vocabulary, but with the same sneezes and jeers that are accorded a ham novelist in the current prints. Milton, Byron and Whitman were not unacquainted with the critical raspberry in their lifetimes, and it is certain that the mere getting out of the rubber-tired hack and rolling them off to the cemetery did not rectify their deficiencies, render more agreeable their not infrequent dullness, nor sublimate their frowsy cliches into epigrams of the Roi Cooper Magrue order...
...books of non-fiction, of philosophy or psychology, of travel or biography, that have struck the popular fancy recently, although usually validly interesting, have attained remarkable sales entirely unanticipated by their publishers. Surprised, and hopeful of repeating the successes, these gentlemen have responded by setting a horde of hack writers to work at mere compilation and redaction. The result has been a flood of matter that excells the pamphlets of former centuries only in that it is better bound and more expensive. Uneasy under the searchlight of critics, the public has been self-consciously seeking knowledge, but it is impossible...