Word: puritans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Robert Graves, brilliant, 49-year-old veteran of 60 volumes of fiction, poetry and biography, has given Poet Milton a drubbing-on the same scanty evidence. His new novel, Wife to Mr. Milton, is an icy, wife's-eye-view of the Puritan Revolution's dourest man and greatest poet, set against the backdrop of the English Civil War. It is based on Marie's "secret diary" (which exists only in Author Graves's imagination), plus Graves's solid knowledge of Milton's life & times...
...result is, like Santayana's The Last Puritan, a novel in the form of a memoir, not autobiographical, since it centers on someone other than the author, not fiction, since what it tells really happened, not biography, since it is not confined in a rigid framework of fact. At its best, this type of work combines the narrative interest of fiction with the educative value of biography...
...Puritan colonies tried to suppres time-honored holidays like Christmas an-Midsummer's Day. Thanksgiving was pretty good substitute for the former and the people insisted on making Harvard Commencement a substitute for the latter. By the early eighteenth century, Harvard Commencement had become a "riot" Every graduate came if he possibly could, and those who had no right of admission to the Meetinghouse (on the site of Lehman Hall) where the degrees were conferred came out to watch the procession and see the sights. Cambridge common was covered by tonts of huck-sters, cheap-jacks, Indian basket-sellers...
From his cool and shabby room behind the mellowed walls of Rome's Convent of the Little Company of Mary, the 80-year-old philosopher spoke sparingly last week of things beyond the noise of war. George Santayana's fame as a poet, philosopher, novelist (The Last Puritan) made the newsmen listen to him respectfully. The old philosopher's aloof attitude was bound to irritate men who were very near to war. But his words were worth listening...
...respectable Puritan ate shad; he considered it vulgar...