Word: ordeal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Even more than most of the U.S. press, Philadelphia's twice-weekly Tribune found front-page copy in the ordeal of William Edward Myers Jr., 34, a refrigerator-equipment tester, after he moved his wife and three children into a three-bedroom house in Levittown, Pa. The Myerses are Negroes, the first to move into Levittown* and the Tribune, a Negro paper only 21 miles away, gave all-out coverage to the tense week in which state troopers finally discouraged the jeering, stone-throwing mob that kept badgering the Myers home...
...first wife's death, this pillar of respectability, this devotee of reason, Arthur Winner, had embarked on an adulterous affair with Marjorie Penrose, wife of his crippled friend. In flashback ignominy, Winner relives their mute animal couplings, the gross infidelity of "two cheap sneaks." With this recollection the ordeal of Arthur Winner has begun...
Orderly & Properly. There was nothing in Alfried Krupp's sheltered life to prepare him for this ordeal. The first of Gustav's and Bertha's eight children, he grew up in an atmosphere suggestive of Novelist Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Kaiser Wilhelm II was his godfather. Young Alfried's world centered around Villa Hugel, which was not only a well-regulated German household to its inhabitants but the focus of social life for the Ruhr. The children saw little of their parents or other children, spent most of their time in the care of teachers...
...Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold tells the story of a character admittedly like Waugh himself-fiftyish, a successful novelist, Tory, Roman Catholic, snobbish, a connoisseur of manners and wine, member of a first-class club and old boy of a second-class public school...
That sample gave promise of being up to the level of early-vintage Waugh. For all its high curiosity value, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is hardly that. It may even remind some readers of the story of the man who complained to his doctor not so much because he had the habit of talking to himself, but that he was such a damned bore. Fortunately, Pinfold's voices were scripted by a novelist who may be many things, but never a bore...