Word: mid-20th
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After twelve volumes of his justly celebrated sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, 75, has established himself as the reigning novelist of British understatement. In this third volume of his autobiography, the master whisperer so thoroughly muffles the barbarous yawps of the mid-20th century-from Dylan Thomas to World War II-that they emerge as discreetly as the sound of one teacup cracking...
There was in mid-20th century an American institution known as the Green Card. It was difficult to acquire, and it was issued only to the most desirable foreigners who sought it. The fortunate man or woman who obtained it was ensured permanent residence in the U.S., from which many corporeal and psychological benefits might flow...
...with an untamed wilderness and distances their European forebears could barely comprehend, the settlers who came to colonize the new land responded by becoming a nation of tinkerers, backyard inventors and, ultimately, technologists. Now, lacking a wilderness but confronted with challenges as great as those faced by their ancestors, mid-20th century Americans are responding similarly. In university and corporate laboratories, in basement and attic workshops, they are busy trying to invent their way out of an energy crisis, the worst recession in a generation and, toughest of all, what appears to be a global shortage of raw materials...
...quotation is from 1876 (Random House, 364 pages, $10), Gore Vidal's new novel. In any other year but the Bicentennial, 1876 would merely be a bestseller. It was, after all, prompted by two earlier Vidal bestsellers: Washington, D.C. (1967), a study of mid-20th century political scrambling; and Burr (1973), a revisionist appraisal of the foundering fathers. "With 1876" says Vidal, "I've examined the dead center of the country, the year of the Centennial, and there's a nice symmetry, obviously, that it's coming out the year of the Bicentennial...
...fellow whose prose as well as his poetry thumped as cheerfully as a barroom song-when, that is, he wasn't spinning animal tales for children. Then, in a famous essay, The Kipling That Nobody Read, Edmund Wilson updated this naïf into a modish vision of mid-20th century tragedy...