Word: horatios
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...MARQUAND completed his first "serious" novel, The Late George Apley, the curious masterpiece that has made critical appreciation of his work so difficult. The book is in the form of one of the posthumously written "memorials," privately printed, that were in vogue in the early part of the century. Horatio Willing, one of Apley's oldest friends and a clubmate at Harvard, writes a commentary on a chronology of letters written to and by George Apley. Through Willing's amusing pomposity and old Boston's strange attitudes, Marquand filters a story that is unexpectedly but tremendously moving. When Apley...
...ears with copybook maxims about the devil finding work for idle hands and God helping those who help themselves. Successive waves of immigrants took those lessons to heart, and they aimed for what they thought was the ultimate success open to them -middle-class status. They almost deified Horatio Alger's fictional heroes, like Ragged Dick, who struggled up to the middle class by dint of hard work...
...much remains of that proud heritage. Today, in a time of the decline of organized churches, work has lost most of its religious significance. Horatio Alger is camp. Only a minority of workers remember the Depression. Welfare and unemployment benefits have reduced the absolute necessity of working, or at least made idleness less unpleasant...
...trace of bitterness, that she has always been too busy working to "just sit back" and think of herself or her "ideas," but she does seem to have her own vision of America. Reports TIME Correspondent Bonnie Angelo: "Her view of life is that of Pollyanna going steady with Horatio Alger. With hard work and the old dependable virtues, there is nowhere you can't go. That's the way it was for her and Dick, and the America she sees agrees with...
Nixon went after personal achievement and material success. Life became a contest where the strong and persistent endured, the controlled and clever won the field. Each person looked out for himself and his, worried about his own life more than his neighbor's. Horatio Alger may have entered McGovern's life, but not nearly so much as the apostle Peter. If there was endurance and struggle and self-improvement, it was often related to other people or grander designs. In those small towns of Depression days the churches taught history through the Bible and the music that came...