Word: novelistically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...desire for extinction-Shneidman and Farberow call them "surcease" suicides. Brilliant, hard-driving lames Forrestal, the first U.S. Defense Secretary, who threw himself from a 16th-story hospital window in May of 1949, was suffering from a mental breakdown and decided that life was unendurable with his mind impaired. Novelist Virginia Woolf also killed herself (in April 1941) because she thought she was going mad. Poet Hart Crane was seriously deranged when he killed himself in April 1932, as was Ernest Hemingway when he blew his brains out with his favorite shotgun. Hemingway's suicide raises the problem...
...dreams of glory as a star basketball center were dashed when, after one look at her height, Smith decided that she had an unfair advantage over her college mates, changed the intramural rules so that the ball was thrown in from the side. With vague hopes of becoming a novelist and a ¶average, she graduated...
Thirty years ago, when Dos Passos wrote The Big Money, the second novel of the U.S.A. trilogy, a TIME cover story (Aug. 10, 1936) saw him mainly as a valuable contemporary historian, a journalist of genius rather than a novelist-the composer, as Dos Passos puts it now, of "a narrative panorama to which I saw no end." These judgments pertain today, though it is also true that the work that stood "midway between history and fiction" was fiction all along. Dos Passes' bare, flat non-style, in which events-tragical, comical, pastoral or historical-were impersonally told...
Influential Style. That hidden art was often overshadowed by Dos Passes' obtrusive style. He devised what he called The Camera Eye-poetically subjective inlays in the raw plain-deal prose, where the novelist had his metrical fling out of earshot of his characters. Another invention was the impressionist profile of contemporary figures, of which the most famous had the echoing refrain: "Wars, machine-gun fire and arson-good growing weather for the House of Morgan." These sketches-of Henry Ford and Big Bill Haywood the Wobbly leader, of Rudolph Valentino and Isadora Duncan-were brilliant in themselves...
...enormous noise of silence has followed the ideological clamor of the '30s. But Dos Passos can now be regarded as an essential historian of an era-not a great novelist but a greater taker of notes playing the unwelcome role of a man who repeats things that others have said and would rather forget. It may seem old hat today, but it is a hat that many Americans have worn. Dos Passos may well claim to have been consistent in the oldfashioned, cranky Yankee way of distrusting all ideologies, of resisting all managerial systems that claim to improve...