Word: pearsons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...military aide, Major General Harry Vaughan, will not get to wear his medal from Argentina's Juan Peron, after all, because a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee refused to authorize it. The fight over the medal had inspired Truman's "s.o.b." blast at Columnist Drew Pearson...
DICKENS: HIS CHARACTER, COMEDY & CAREER (361 pp.)-Hesketh Pearson-Harper...
...G.B.S.'s idea. "As you have done Shakespeare and Shaw," he told Biographer Hesketh Pearson, "are you not bound to do Dickens? Anybody but Dickens will be a comedown after Shakespeare and G.B.S." Pearson, who is Britain's most fecund literary biographer* and a Dickens fan to boot, heartily agreed; and although his Dickens reveals more about the man and his life than about the artist and his novels, it is nonetheless the best-balanced, most complete biography to date...
...Charles Dickens such a tough cadaver for the dissector is the fact that he embodied (in the words of his friend Leigh Hunt) "the life and soul ... of 50 human beings." Some of these 50 beings were pretty sleazy characters, and they have been sternly ignored by those whom Pearson calls "Dickolators." Most biographers have refused to admit that their idol often fell short of the ideal Dickens expressed: a "glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming [attitude] to Home and Fireside...
When, at the age of 45, he fell in love with 18-year-old Ellen Ternan (who didn't love him, says Author Pearson, but "placed comfort before chastity"), he had little compunction about booting his wife out of the house, retaining custody of most of the children and giving a thoroughly dishonest version of his behavior to the newspapers. He aroused millions to compassion for "fallen women," but once, hearing a young girl swear obscenely on the street, he had her marched straight off to jail. It was this inability to see life (or himself) in consistent proportions...