Word: marquands
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Texas-born Professor Mills uncovers some pretty startling social phenomena. The reader will hear that the rich have more money than other people and so can afford better schools, longer vacations and more luxury all around. Old money, what the sociologist in John Marquand's Point of No Return called "mellow wampum," isn't good because it's too snobbish and irresponsible. New money isn't good because it has to be acquired by means that would horrify a hard-working sociologist. Mills does not say how much money a man may accumulate and still stay...
...more hero than villain (although a little confused) in such novels as Cameron Hawley's Cash McCall and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It was perhaps significant of the relative absence of satire that so gentle a writer as J. P. Marquand emerged with the year's best American satirical novel. Sincerely, Willis Wayde, the derisive and sympathetic portrait of an eager-beaver businessman who so hotly wooed success that he unwittingly lost his decency during the courtship...
Nonetheless, Marquand has undoubtedly been greatly responsible for some outdated and rather absurd popular conceptions about the interests and caliber of the post-War Harvard undergraduate...
...Late George Apley, whose narrator is the perfect embodiment of the kind of Harvard man that Marquand has been satirizing for the past twenty years, explores with amazingly sustained deadpan humor the narrow social sensibility that one usually associates with the "Old Grad" type. Clubs, the "Pudding," and afternoon tea at prominent Boston houses are the essential activities of George Apley at Harvard. With very minor variations, this type of society is the one that Marquand writes about when, as in Wickford Point and Sincerely, Willis Wayde, he turns specifically to Harvard. It would be silly to base a general...
...most recent books that have devoted any considerable space to Harvard are John Phillips, '46 The Second Happiest Day and Faithful Are the Wounds by May Sarton. Phillips, who (as everyone will tell you confidentially) is Marquand's son, takes a closer look at the institutions which Marquand satirizes. But final clubs and social prestige are still the main thoughts of his Harvard students, although they have a far broader outlook than the George Apley type. Phillips plainly has an acute understanding of the kind of Harvard man he depicts, and has probably written the most valid and sympathetic description...