Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wear this conviction like a badge of honor...I don't feel disgraced at all." His world view crystallized long ago into patterns of Cold War confrontation. But one cannot gauge Helms the individual from The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Touching only briefly on Helms' personal life, Powers attempts to tell the secret history of the CIA by using his career as a reference point; since Powers portrays Helms only in his Langley office persona, he appears for the most part as just a particularly durable background actor in a play where the cast changes with every act. Aside...
TAKE A FAMOUS CHARACTER as protagonist, add a wife and kids and a few servants, mix in a fair amount of imagined 'typical daily life' and arrive at the typewriter with the ready made historical novel. Thus we learn how Freud puts on his shirt, or how Lincoln liked his eggs. Our interest in these quotidian events lies mainly in the protagonist's eventual fame or historical dimensions...
...this crowd, though not of the same public stature, in fact, very little has been written about him: he made a fortune in shoe-manufacturing, and the Pusey Library archives hold a slim volume on the gigantic endowments he left to Harvard. Though he arrives at his true life circumstances by the end of the novel, McKay first undertakes a long fictional journey to Kansas and back. McMahon has given him depth, complicated his life, and intersected his life with other', real and fictional. But in the end the real McKay surfaces, a great deal more intriguing for the reader...
With E.I. Lonoff, Roth brings to life a compelling and intricate character. Lonoff, in a self-destructive pursuit of the perfection of his art, exemplifies the life of a great writer for Nathan, for whom quelling desire in the interest of better art is a new phenomenon. "There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful art out of," wails Hope...
...turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning...