Word: popular
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Japanese went the whole way and organized from the scientific grass roots up. Probably no other country in the world has a scientific "congress" that is elected by popular vote of its scientists...
...sure-fire Broadway investment, in spite of the fact that five of his songs (Begin the Beguine, Just One of Those Things, What Is This Thing Called Love?, Night and Day and I Get a Kick Out of You) ranked last year among the 35 all-time U.S. popular favorites. (The record is matched only by Irving Berlin, and was not equaled by such Tin Pan Alley titans as Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers...
From Broadway to Padua. Porter's music is just as distinctively his. Many of his songs, like Night and Day, favor a long melodic line that breaks out of the traditional four-measure bounds of the popular ballad. He can write gaily, in complicated rhythms (as in Anything Goes). He can match a pointedly off-color lyric with an insinuating tune (as in My Heart Belongs to Daddy). But the true Porter hallmark is cut in the bittersweet lament of What Is This Thing Called Love? and in the sultry, Latin fervor of Begin the Beguine...
...shown such zest as tunesmith and playboy during most of his 55 years that many an admirer thinks of him as a brilliant dilettante. Actually, as Kiss Me, Kate proves better than any of his previous work, he is one of the most thoroughly trained musicians among U.S. popular composers. He is as painstaking a craftsman as any. He is no less rigorously professional in his approach to what his good friend, Actor Clifton Webb, calls "the perfectly regulated life...
...Critic Ralph Thompson pointed out in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, there was nothing really so surprising about Douglas' victory. "Those who hope to qualify as No. 1 popular novelist," wrote Thompson, "had better follow the formula . . .1) operate within a historical, costumed setting, or 2) develop a devotional theme. The Big Fisherman does both. The Naked and the Dead does neither...