Word: newburyport
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...Marquand's last book is not a novel, but it is only his novelist's hand that saves it from being merely a literary curiosity. Good family boy that he was, Marquand never lost his gossip's and antiquarian's interest in the past of Newburyport, Mass., a place that was never long out of his thoughts in fact or in fiction. In 1925, before he had written anything better than hack historicals, he dusted off some old documents, ran down some dubious legends and wrote a book about a fascinating 18th century eccentric, Lord Timothy...
...Newburyport. just after the Revolutionary War, was fast slipping its Puritan chains. The rich, the decent and the God fearing still ran things, but there was plenty of heavy drinking, and sons of the well-to-do liked to prove their nonchalance by slipping a hundred-dollar bill into a sandwich and eating it. Poor Timothy Dexter wanted desperately to break into the upper crust, but he hadn't a prayer. All he had was money, made by buying up Continental dollars for pennies when most people thought they would become worthless. Overnight a man of affairs instead...
...drunk or sober." He sees him as a caricature of his period, but his dubious hero gives him a chance to revisit a time and a way of life that Marquand found more gracious and attractive than the "five o'clock shadow of mediocrity" that is creeping over Newburyport. It was only a little way down the road, in neighboring Newbury, that death found Marquand himself two months...
...right school-recalling, in a less obsessed way, the social preoccupation of John O'Hara, which once inspired Hemingway to groan: "Lord, I wish someone would start a fund to send O'Hara to Yale." Marquand, at least, got to Harvard, the son of an old Newburyport family which, like Charley Gray's, had lost its money and no longer lived on the best street. But he felt ill at ease because he had not prepped at Exeter or St. Mark...
...past-beyond Harvard, beyond newspaper days, beyond his two marriages and divorces, eventually even beyond George Apley. His latest, unpublished book, Timothy Dexter Revisited, is a new treatment of an early subject, the story of a colonial eccentric that gave him a chance to reminisce about 18th century Newburyport, the home of his ancestors...