Word: lawyered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Seen superficially, Arthur Winner needs no more education. He is a successful lawyer in his 50s, a figure of Roman rectitude, a bald, grave patrician, sage and self-contained. In his middle-sized home town of Brocton (possibly located in Pennsylvania), he belongs to a comfortable upper class that has the attitudes if not the acreage of landed gentry. Within a 49-hour period, fissures of revelation about Winner's closest friends-and about himself-rip open this safe and stolid world, and almost swallow...
...heighten the impact of these revelations, Cozzens feeds the reader key episodes from Arthur Winner's past with flashbacks so deft as to be intravenous. There is Lawyer Arthur Winner Sr., a dispassionate Victorian man of reason, his son's model and hero. An agnostic, he has been cut down in the fullness of life by cancer, and young Arthur learns his first sobering lesson-"How dies the wise man ... as the fool." With life's occasional flair for overemphasis, the lesson is repeated when Arthur's first wife, Hope, dies from the aftereffects of childbirth...
...Clarissa is tall, athletic and thirtyish, an avid latecomer to the art of love. The hour of that art which the couple share in Cozzens' pages has not been paralleled for clinical candor in U.S. fiction since Edmund Wilson singed the censors with Memoirs of Hecate County. Yet Lawyer Winner has a more demanding love-the law. The law is his passion precisely because it rules out passion. He is comforted by its seductive repose, "that majestic calm of reason designed to curb all passions or enthusiasms of emotion...
...first families and are treated by them as near equals precisely because they make no unseemly claims to equality, e.g., in Arthur Winner's church, the Negro sexton deferentially takes communion last. Racially barbed is Cozzens' depiction of Eliot Woolf, a razor-sharp New York lawyer and a Jew-turned-Episcopalian whose "astute smelling-out of every little advantage . . . outside due process" makes Arthur Winner slightly queasy...
...with McCarthy-now Boyle" was the slogan stitched on new political banners unfurled across Wisconsin last week. "Boyle" is Lawyer Howard H. (for Henry) Boyle Jr., 36, of Milwaukee, an Old Guard Republican who, two hours before the deadline, filed as an independent candidate for next week's special election to fill Joe McCarthy's U.S. Senate seat. Wisconsin voters seemed to be taking Boyle coolly, but the state's G.O.P. leaders were steaming. Reason: Boyle had turned what seemed a certain victory for G.O.P. Candidate Walter Jodok Kohler Jr. into a just-might chance for Democrat...