Word: itches
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...formal schooling stopped at 16. Sloan was a poor boy with an itch to make pictures but without much obvious talent ("My sisters and I all drew equally well"). To support himself, Sloan designed calendars and valentines, sold pen & ink copies of Rembrandt etchings. At 21 he went to work for the Philadelphia Inquirer, making on-the-spot news sketches of fires, elections, suicides and parades. The job helped him develop drawing facility, and gave him a down-to-earth philosophy of art: "An artist is a spectator...
Author Pierre Stephen Robert Payne started something in 1919 that he can't stop. He was only seven that year, but he had an attack of writer's itch, and with the same zest another boy his age might have used to dismember a grasshopper, Payne wrote The True Adventures of Princess Sylvia. His manuscript showed a youthful disdain for humdrum fact, e.g., he set Princess Sylvia to reign not only over Denmark, but over all of Asia as well. The main thing was that his writer's itch turned chronic. This week, at 40, he published...
Victor Sawdon Pritchett lives in a cottage in the English countryside and, week in and out, writes (for the New Statesman and Nation) the best literary criticism in Britain today. But Critic Pritchett has an itch, and a talent, to do more. When he has time, which is not too often, he writes fiction. At its best, as in his book of stories, It May Never Happen (1947), this fiction shows marvelous quiet skill at catching the character of well-meaning failures...
David Jones did not look like a spy. He had suffered no longtime itch to be one; he became one on impulse. A skinny Negro, born in Missouri 36 years ago, he had gone to high school in Kansas City, learned radio mechanics, roamed the U.S. as an itinerant radio technician. Some months ago he started out for Japan to try for a civilian job with the U.S. Army. He got as far as Manila, stuck there...
From the notes in the Journal, Wolfe hoped that he might "succeed in recording a whole hemisphere of life and of America . . . My ringers are itching to write again." That itch was never worked off. Four days after the trip was over, Tom Wolfe had pneumonia. Ten weeks later he was dead of a brain infection...