Word: icon
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...Portnoy's Complaint, in which the protagonist never stops griping that his desires are repugnant to his morals. Tolstoy's diaries and instructional writings are engorged with this seriocomic theme, a fact that led Biographer Henri Troyat to conclude more than 20 years ago that Russia's literary icon was "a billy-goat pining for purity...
...Chicago Mayor Richard Daley snarling read-my- lips obscenities in 1968 or Senator Edward Kennedy battling a sitting President to the last bitter moment in 1980, Democrats have settled their differences with the civility of the Hatfields and the McCoys. Even the 1932 convention that first nominated Party Icon Franklin Roosevelt was raucous and bitter. As H.L. Mencken wrote at the time, "The great combat is ending this afternoon in classical Democratic manner. That is to say, the victors are full of uneasiness and the vanquished are full of bile...
...beginning of World War II. She inherited considerable wealth and earned a great deal in addition by her writing; such novels as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence were critical and commercial successes. She became so formidable a literary icon during the 1920s that F. Scott Fitzgerald, invited to meet her, drank more than was advisable to steady himself before his audience with the great lady. As a result, he told off- color jokes. Wharton noted in her diary that evening: "To tea, Teddy Chanler and Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist...
...fortune made, Bentsen returned to politics in 1970, taking on a fellow Democrat and populist icon, Senator Ralph Yarborough. With the help of the L.B.J.-Connally wing of the party, Bentsen won the primary in a brawl that was messy even by Texas standards. Bentsen linked Yarborough with antiwar demonstrations and ran commercials of the uproar outside the 1968 Democratic Convention to make his point. He labeled Senator Edmund Muskie, who came to campaign for Yarborough, an ultra-liberal. Yarborough kicked up dust as well, calling the Bentsens a family of land frauds and exploiters, a reference to lawsuits that...
Twenty-five years ago, as legend has it, a genie with a six-day stubble alighted on Clint Eastwood's shoulder and vouchsafed him the secret of star acting: "Don't act. You're an icon, pal. Get used to it." The advice has served Eastwood well. From his starmaking stint as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns to this, his fifth film as Dirty Harry Callahan, Eastwood has built a durable celebrity on his unique brand of Zen surliness. By now his character need hardly cock an eyebrow, let alone a trigger, to send...