Word: pollyanna
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Babbitt, Jrs. "The Genius Of America" will, perhaps, be of great value and interest. For others, it deals too much in platitudes. Professor Sherman's logic is that of the Chamber of Commerce mixed in with the bright sweetness of Pollyanna's elder brother. But, according to the publisher "This book is written by one intensely conscious of the situation". "For all its basic seriousness, it makes bright and lively reading...
...filled nearly a dozen theatres this season. At least she is a cheerful dope fiend. Hers no life of nervous shivering, furtive sniffs of coke, and dull-eyed fits of depression, but rather a bright and sunny addict, having a good time with her drugs. In fact the very Pollyanna of snow birds, now singing, now clowning, now whimsical, but always looking on the bright side of morphia. It is, perhaps, the most interesting and innocuous, if the least harrowing of the dope plays, which will take some of the sting out of the current Hearst expose of the narcotic...
...this, it might be objected, is a pessimistic view of the matter; we can hardly be expected, however, to rejoice, Pollyanna-wise, that Curley did not win by a larger majority. We might as well admit that there is something rotten in a state nearer than Denmark...
...book reaches down and stirs up the very dregs of reality. Life may not be like Pollyanna but we can only hope that it is not like Gibbeted Gods. At least a dabbling is made into every well known form of vicious indulgence, of which drinking and drug-using are not the least. There is one touch of sordidness after another, and misery and tragedy to the nth degree...