Word: originators
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When oil was discovered in 1932, nobody knew who really owned the land. In association with some other oil companies, Humble bought up leases based on one deed, of doubtful origin, which had been ticking around Texas for 40 years. The company also tracked down some 60 descendants of old Allen Vince, paid them $300,000, gave them royalty rights. But Bumble's lawyers were still worried about Wilson Strickland. They cut off the Vinces' royalty payments, invited them to start a lawsuit which would settle title for once & all, advertised for heirs of Wilson Strickland to join...
Every payday he bought more books. Du Maurier suggested Dumas, De Musset, Villon (he picked up French) ; De Quincey brought him toward Wordsworth; Hazlitt, by devious means, to the metaphysicians. He read The Origin of Species and a life of Buddha; he bought a Gray's Anatomy and set his hopes toward medicine. Those hopes were forgotten when he happened on Chaucer, Keats and Shelley, who opened "a world where incredible beauty was daily bread and breath of life...
...Since Germany did not pay for its imports, it could resell them at any price it chose. U.S. buyers used to get Brazilian coffee, Bulgarian tobacco, Greek currants cheaper in Berlin than in the countries of origin...
...chose that year because in 1859 Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, Karl Marx published his Critique of Political Economy, Richard Wagner finished Tristan und Isolde. These three were the intellectual forebears of Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini. They were the intellectual forebears of nearly everybody else in the Western world too. And, says Author Barzun, "it would be hard to find in the whole history of Western civilization a corresponding trio to share the honors of a single epoch with such perfect parallelism...
Some three-fourths of Author Barzun's book is taken up with biographical sketches of Darwin, Marx, Wagner, which serve as background for the development of their ideas. Barzun describes Darwin's difficulties in getting famed British Publisher John Murray to publish On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (a title whose four great phrases seem to Barzun "a stroke of genius...