Word: mann
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...York society," declared Colonel William d'Alton Mann, "is inhabited by jackasses, libertines and parvenus." Not that he minded. For one thing, they made sensational copy for his scurrilous, scandalous Town Topics. For another, the publicity-shy Four Hundred provided him with a lucrative sideline: Publisher Mann was the nation's most notorious blackmailer. He was also a Civil War hero, a talented inventor and a bon vivant. Nearly forgotten since his death in 1920, he re-emerges in this witty, engaging biography by The New Yorker's Andy Logan as a prize addition to the gang...
...Mann looked like a nightmare version of Santa Claus: a mop of white hair, a red, emphatic nose, and a tangle of untamed whiskers that parted beneath his chin. He also had the noisy energy of a stern-wheeler and the predacity of a buccaneer...
After the war, the colonel really began to find his footing. Armed with a suitcase full of promotional handbills and a bottle of lubricating oil, he sold $57,500 worth of stock in a nonexistent oil well. The shareholders finally caught on, and Mann was brought to trial; but the judge dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction. Encouraged, Mann packed his carpetbag in 1866 and moved on to Mobile as Federal Assessor of Internal Revenue. In 1872 he patented a design for a railroad sleeping car (consisting of a series of stateroomlike compartments) and sailed for Europe. There...
Everybody talked about Mann, but nobody dared do anything, since his facts were unerringly accurate. Mann had his price but he rarely used direct blackmail. Instead he "sold" his victims advertising in Town Topics, stock in his corporation (which never paid a dividend), or subscriptions to his Fads and Fancies of Representative-Americans, the colonel's hypocritical who's who in society. John Jacob Astor bought. So did J. P. Morgan, Mrs. Collis Huntington, Clarence Mackay, three Vanderbilts and scores of others...
...today's literature there are few "great deaths." Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Conrad gave death a tragic dimension. Hemingway was among the last to try; his heroes died stoically, with style, like matadors. Nowadays, death tends to be presented as a banal accident in an indifferent universe. Much of the Theater of the Absurd ridicules both death and modern man's inability to cope with it. In lonesco's Amedee, or How to Get Rid of It, the plot concerns a corpse that grows and grows until it floats away in the shape of a balloon-a balloon...