Word: humorless
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...voice that heroines are not often virgins heroes are not usually gentlemen. He did not necessarily punish the wicked. Indeed, in Dreiser's novels good and evil do not exist-there is only unheroic suffering and scrambling for success. In retrospect, his prose seems clotted, clumsy, pompous, prolix, humorless, flatulent and dull. An American Tragedy ran to 385,000 words ("250,000 of them unnecessary," snorted Mencken). Nevertheless, Dreiser's dogged honesty and ruthless candor opened the way for all the social realists of the '30s (many drearier than Dreiser) and also, in a way, for Hemingway...
...More devils can be routed by a little laughter than by a carload of humorless piety," writes Methodist Pastor Charles Merrill Smith in How to Be come a Bishop Without Being Religious (Doubleday; $3.50). The devils that Smith wants to exorcise are the phony pietism and the trivial hypocrisy that many a Protestant pastor has to indulge in if he intends to climb the hierarchical ladder of his church...
...history takes stage center as Bitos actually becomes Robespierre. There are tableaux of the boy being caned by a Jesuit schoolmaster for his stiff-necked pride, of Robespierre as a humorless young parliamentary Stalin outraging the more moderate Mirabeau ("You've taught me a very sad thing, which is that the Revolution could be a bore"), of Robespierre dictating new decrees of death in a last mad spasm of guillotine-hungry power...
...Washington's most sedate, tasteful and elegant hotel: The May-flower. Along the gently curving balconies of the ballroom, party employees draped slender streamers of bunting dotted with tiny LBJ-HHH stickers. At each end of the room hung modestly sized portraits of the ticket mates, both pale and humorless...
...Stone. Other leaders in history have felt that they were doing God's bidding, but none with the sublime certitude of Cromwell. To the brilliant, humorless Puritan who routed the Royalist armies in England's civil war and ruled the nation for a decade until his death in 1658, "providence and necessity" seemed synonymous. In this finely etched account of the winter of 1648-49, the height of Cromwell's career, British Historian C. V. Wedgewood shows how relentlessly he invoked both, to strip away the "divinity that doth hedge a king...