Word: pulham
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...typical Marquand hero is usually caught in the middle-classic double play: Ford to Buick to Cadillac. But where The Late George Apley had a lot of endearing old charms and H. M. Pulham, Esq. wore his stuffiness with a certain dignity, Willis Wayde comes closer to being a thorough s.o.b. than any previous Marquand hero...
...office in Appleton, Wis. one autumn day, a lean, brown-haired man sat down at his desk to face an irksome task. Nathan Marsh Pusey was writing his biography for the 25th reunion of his class at Harvard, and it was with much of the agony that H. M. Pulham Esq. went through ("a good deal like something on a tombstone . . . never did like writing . . .") that he dutifully recorded his life. He noted that he had three chil dren, was president of Appleton's Lawrence College (enrollment: 800), that "liberal education is my chief concern." But by the time...
...theme of Phillip's first novel. The book's tragic hero, George "Gopher" Marsh, is rich, athletic, well-born, handsome, and intelligent. He has everything, in fact, except a sense of purpose. The narrator is his friend Gus Taylor who, like Nick Carraway in "Gatsby" and Bill King in "Pulham," wanders through an aristocratic group without actually being part of it. His slight detachment from the over-ripe world of his friends provides Gus with both a pinnacle from which to view their fevered, aimless partying, and, ultimately, an escapehatch leading to his own salvation...
Marquand's last six novels, from The Late George Apley to B.F.'s Daughter, have sold 2,600,000 copies. Three of them were book-club choices (H.M. Pulham, Esquire and So Little Time, Book-of-the-Month; B.F.'s Daughter, Literary Guild) ; three of them made box-office movies. Whatever the critics may say about Point of No Return (Marquand says, "I take a dim view of all serious critics-I don't know any who've had a kind word to say for me, ever since I was a little...
Marquand did make the Harvard Lampoon. Friend Roger Burlingame (Harvard '13) remembers that John would "caricature his classmates in a way that scared us when we got through laughing." When H. M. Pulham, Esquire was published in 1941 (an acid picture of a Har-vardman being smothered by Boston convention), his classmates of a quarter-century before had every right to become thoughtful, if not scared...