Word: marquands
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
Even for a greaseball, however, there were Harvard compensations. In Cambridge, Marquand lived in the same rooming house as young James Bryant Conant, now Harvard's president. Marquand remembers him as a brilliant student who invented the "two-drink dash," a simple game in which a prize was supposed to go to the man who could get by subway to a wine shop in Boston, bolt two drinks and get back in the shortest time. "We spent a good deal of our time doing the two-drink dash, but I don't remember that anybody ever...
...Marquand's badgered males seldom know where they're really heading. Undergraduate Marquand resembled one of his own heroes. He had concentrated on chemistry, like Fellow Dasher Conant, but after hitting the books with some success (he took his degree in three years), he decided that science was not his field. The most attractive job he could find was a place as a cub reporter on the Boston Transcript. He was just learning his way around when President Wilson called out the National Guard, ordered some of it to the Mexican border. A friend reminded John that...
Then came World War I. J. P. Marquand saw action, rose to the rank of captain, but (though he later recalled it effectively in So Little Time) the war roused in him no Hemingway impulses to write about it. "Of course I got frightened to death on a number of occasions and I saw a lot of people get killed, but I don't think it did very much...
Indecent Exposure. Instead, Marquand came back from the war "full of beans and determined to make one billion dollars." He compromised for a $50-a-week job on the New York Tribune Sunday section, then shifted to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency as a copywriter (after Harvardman Robert Benchley, '12, tipped him off that a job was open...