Word: pollyanna
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Story. Pollyanna Whittier, inventor of the famed "glad game" (which consists of picking out silver linings for all the blackest clouds), marries Jimmy Pendleton in Chapter One and becomes forthwith "just the entrancing, glad little bride you would expect her (from the previous Pollyanna books**) to be." It rains on her wedding-day, Jimmy hasn't much money, their apartment looks out on fire-escapes, Jimmy eats up the chicken-salad she was saving for dinner, just because he happens to find it alone and unprotected in the icebox - but things of this sort are, to Pollyanna, merely added...
Then she goes back to her old home in Beldingsville, Vt., lives with her Aunt Polly. Here it was that she had arrived some years before (in Pollyanna), a forlorn little orphan determined to play the "glad game." This was the same little corner she had brightened before, and naturally it falls on its neck to make her welcome, it has not forgotten the wistful little minister's daughter who even found something to be "glad" about when a pair of crutches was all that came for her in the missionary barrel...
...Significance. When Eleanor H. Porter, author of the first two Pollyanna books, died four years ago, Pollyanna ostensibly died with...
...publishers were loath to lose such a goldmine. They cast about for a successor, and now they have blandly announced that they "felt that the lamented death of the creator of Pollyanna should not deprive the public of the eagerly awaited continuation of the story of Pollyanna and the glad game...
...ethics of the proceeding seem a little hazy. One wonders whether Pollyanna's creator would be unqualifiedly "glad" at this calm appropriation of her brainchild. It is true, however, that there have been and still are voracious readers of this drivel. Over half a million copies of Pollyanna were sold, it was translated into five languages, including Japanese, and a Finnish edition is now under way. A prodigious mushroom crop of "Glad dubs" sprang up in its wake, and innumerable families were afflicted with "glad" little girls who, when a bee stung them, were glad it wasn...