Word: kennicott
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...gave to the culture-curious and the culture-hungry a tent show of live entertainment that ranged from the Kaffir Boys' Choir to a course on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, from the measured comments of Viscount Bryce to the soaring platitudes of William Jennings Bryan. Carol Kennicott, the stifled and discontented heroine of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, went to Chautauqua in Gopher Prairie and "was impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to think, the men in vests and shirtsleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh...
Authors Victoria and Robert Case (brother & sister) are far from agreeing with Carol Kennicott that Chautauqua was "nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm." We Called It Culture recalls how cheap and tedious Chautauqua could be at its worst. It also insists that at its best it brought to provincial society a leaven of excitement, entertainment and intellectual stimulus...
...cartoon of all U.S. small towns slashed on in strokes broad enough to be unmistakable to the most reluctant. Its inhabitiants, at once fearsome and folksy, were at best expertly stage-managed simulacre of U.S. small-town types, at worst human caricatures of something ineluctably real. Its heroine, Carol Kennicott, the Madame Bovary of the wheat elevators, was the archetype of a million repressed U.S. small-town men & women. Even readers who detested Carol Kennicott as much as her Gopher Prairie neighbors did were attracted by her husband, solid, plodding long-suffering Dr. Will Kennicott. Main Street was a shriek...
Sinclair Lewis gave the world its classic picture of the American conformist. Whether he was known as Babbitt, Doc Kennicott, Joe Doakes or the great American boob, this monster was terrible, and to escape him (or his wife) the intellectuals of the 1920s fled from Main Street...
...poor Irish family, probably somewhere in southern Illinois, handsome, black-haired young Delaney started his acting career about 1910. For two seasons he played the part of Blackie Daw in one of Cohan and Harris' road companies of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingjord. Playing opposite him was Mrs. Kennicott, then Olive Artelle. Delaney left the troupe in 1915 to .go to Australia, where he played the part of The Killer (see cut,p. 51)in Seven Keys toBaldpate in Josephine Cohan's company...