Word: m
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...inhibited-I'm not," he bubbled. The audience sat down again. "Now we will do it with the orchestra, and at the end I will turn around and give you the signal and you will all stand up and sing...
...reading Point of No Return on commuting trains and at home, after the family car has been run into the garage. Ineligible for Book-of-the-Month Club selection because Marquand is one of the club's five* judges (it can and will be a B-O-M "dividend" book), the novel has already gone through four printings totaling 80,000 copies. Wiseacres in the publishing business look upon the figure as a mild beginning...
...slicks exclusively and turned to "serious" novels, his first one, The Late George Apley, got him the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, critical acclaim and a big, new reading public. Proceeds from the Apley play and movie settled him even more firmly on Easy Street, and since 1944 his B-O-M job (a part-time reading chore) has brought him another $20,000 a year. Practical, a lover of comfort and the good things of life (including, among others, three cars, two Scotches before dinner), Marquand is by no means contemptuous of money and is mightily pleased that he has made...
Marquand did make the Harvard Lampoon. Friend Roger Burlingame (Harvard '13) remembers that John would "caricature his classmates in a way that scared us when we got through laughing." When H. M. Pulham, Esquire was published in 1941 (an acid picture of a Har-vardman being smothered by Boston convention), his classmates of a quarter-century before had every right to become thoughtful, if not scared...
...with the manuscript of The Unspeakable Gentleman, an amateurish historical novel which Literary Agent Carl Brandt promptly sold to the Ladies' Home Journal. Says Marquand now: "I will be goddamned if I know why I wrote it. To me it's an indecent exposure and I'm thoroughly ashamed of it." It seemed different at the time: he put his check for $2,000 in the Atlantic Bank of Boston, got a new pair of shoes and had his broken pipes repaired. Admits Marquand: "I have never felt so wonderful in my life...