Word: mccoys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
KISS TOMORROW GOOD-BYE (372 pp.)-Horace McCoy-Random House...
Literary Caveman Horace McCoy has driven to an absurd extreme the hardboiled, feel-my-muscles style of James Cain and Dashiell Hammett, and, to add cultural tone, has dipped into the bowely bathos of the wasn't-Bix-wonderful, oh-blow-that-beautiful-horn school. The result is a gutter-minded, gutter-tongued shocker of alley-cat sex, sadism and unmourned murders-relieved only by odes to Satchmo's and Muggsy's horn blowing...
...Owned the Sow? The feud of the Hatfields and the McCoys is surely one of the great U.S. folk stories. It has sunk into the popular mind with Li'l Abner connotations, a confused impression of moonshiners, hillbillies, revenue officers, and verbs with "a" in front of them ("I don't feel like runnin', I'm a-goin' t'fight"). Actually, the Hatfield-McCoy feud was a tragedy, violent and unrelenting, with its characters, doomed and possessed, living their parts with fixed intensity...
...feeling between the Hatfield and McCoy families reached back before the Civil War. But the real trouble began in 1873, when Floyd Hatfield (Anse's cousin) appropriated a roaming sow and her litter. Old Randolph McCoy said the pigs were his, and had Floyd Hatfield brought into court. The jury was evenly balanced -six McCoys, six Hatfields. But the judge was a Hatfield, and one of the McCoy jurors (married to a Hatfield) wavered. That did it: the Hatfields won the verdict; the hills got a feud that lasted two generations...
...Many Died? Author Jones tells the long story in chronicled detail: the disappearances (till bodies turned up later); the killings in "justified self-defense"; the kidnaping and executions. One day in 1882 the Hatfields intercepted seven peace officers who were taking some of Old Randolph McCoy's sons to jail for the knifing of a Hatfield. The youngest McCoy began to cry. Said Wall Hatfield gruffly, "I'm not going to hurt you." But next day the wounded Hatfield died. His kinsmen turned on the hostages. The bodies of Tolbert, Phamer and young Randolph McCoy were found tied...