Word: luridly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...took Author Hunter only 17 days as a substitute high school teacher in The Bronx to give him the makings of The Blackboard Jungle (TIME, Oct. 11, 1954), a lurid assault on delinquency in big-city classrooms. His second novel, Second Ending, led him into the sickly undergrowth of drug addiction. In his latest fictional safari, Explorer Hunter's credentials are a bit more solid; he lived in a Long Island suburb for four years. What he still lacks are the credentials of the novelist-shortcomings that not even the theme of adultery can handily overcome...
...went on the principle that no man is a hero to his valet. He rounded up eyewitness accounts of valets and those Napoleon treated as valets: mistresses, bodyguards and generals, tailors, aides-de-camp, and such luminaries of the age as Goethe and Metternich. Out of the intimate, often lurid documentation emerges no hero but a devastating closeup of the man who convinced Frenchmen they were a race of heroes, and split nations apart like ripe fruit to show that "given 500,000 men, one can do anything...
Jane Eyre, the novel, was always faintly absurd and decidedly lurid. But to a story bordering on trash, Charlotte Bronte brought storytelling bordering on genius. Told by uncoy, buffeted, orphanage-bred Jane herself-who comes as governess to Thornfield Hall, where the Byronic Mr. Rochester has a mad wife hidden away-Jane Eyre advances, in a rush of words, with a beat of real emotion...
...result, all sorts of plays have been presented on Harvard property, in theaters and House dining rooms. Among them have been a leggy operetta that set one observer talking about "a restoration of paganism"; a steaming drama of the torn-undershirt school; a lurid melodrama of rape, murder, and adultery; and a play about a young man who accuses his mother of making her bed "a couch for luxury and damned incest...
Another problem is the high psychological accident rate. "Women work, men study, families are raised in shifts; too busy people get on each other's too taut nerves in too crowded quarters in too noisy halls. So there are crackups: some lurid ones, strictly for whispering; more strained, silent ones gritted through in the analysts' offices...