Word: parvenu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gleave is head of the Foreign Office's American desk (Maclean's old job). Like many of his kind, he is crushed beneath the upper millstone of parvenu wealth (which he despises) and the nether millstone of the privileged working class, symbolized by a State housing development which will take from him his mortgaged home. Gleave is in the grip of the constant, twitching fear that he and his family will fall into the anonymous abyss of "the proles." His wife has to do the cooking! Gleave is offered a job in commerce at five times his Foreign...
...Well, There It Is." In a sense, wealthy (endowment: $20 million plus an annual income from the Duke Endowment Trust) Duke is really not at all the parvenu it seems. Long before its Gothic towers rose on the empty fields along the western edge of Durham, N.C., the town already had a solid little liberal arts college named Trinity. Said the Trinity catalogue in 1892: "The society of Durham is cultured and elegant." Even more important, elegant Durham also had money. Tobacco Tycoon Washington Duke poured thousands into...
Marie and Gilles, two young lovers in a provincial French town, are fatuously devoted to each other. All that keeps them apart is the snobbery of Marie's parvenu mother. They contrive to meet with the help of an ugly and impoverished aristocrat named Agathe, who has been reduced to working as Marie's governess...
...play is also paced so slowly as to seem not leisurely but monotonous. And its texture turns curiously coarse at times, its curtains much too emphatic. Yancy Loper, the conquering parvenu, is conventionalized into an ardent suitor for Lucy's hand; while the profoundly Chekhovian ending, with the old servant thoughtlessly locked up in the deserted house, was dropped during the tryout because audiences seemed "angered...