Word: sams
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...adopts moderately, and to Evelyn, an anemic young lost lady of the bars, whom he idealizes and takes unto himself with comparative propriety. Gaslit love* in a hall bedroom lasts until she gets a chance to go on the road with one of the immoral, new-fangled "leg-shows." Sam celebrates her departure with an attack of pneumonia that cancels his disgrace at home. Recovered, he devotes his disillusioned attention to Succeeding...
...rides a bicycle through New England peddling hardware. One of his German-Jew employers, Faber, is impressed with his warning that the jobber's day is done, that only manufacturers will survive the business slump. Faber's partner dies. Sam marries Faber's daughter Paula, not wholly for her dashing brunette looks. She brings a $25,000 dowry. Affairs at his and Faber's new nail factory in Bayonne, N. J., make him almost late for the wedding. That night he sits up late reading quotations on steel and pig iron...
After a few summers in Bayonne boarding houses, Sam is growing rich and Paula having men friends. He gets into a Chicago nail-and-wire pool, buys a Superba motor. Paula brings his middle name into play, "S. Osgood Smith." He buys Bethlehem Steel stock and some rolling mills. In the last chapters, Paula is employing their millions to make their daughter's Semitic strain fashionable enough for the Junior League. To Sam, profits are unprofitable. Even the recurrent ghost of Evelyn has become meaningless. He endows universities with an absent gesture; lets his secretaries invent his excuses; fiddles with...
...Significance of this "novel at success" is literary rather than social. Sam Smith is more compelling, as a man than as a "message." And this is strange, for Author Norris writes with more purpose than distinction. Like William Dean Howells, dullness is dear to him. Yet out of a hazy, conventional reconstruction of the Welsbach-burner, balloon-sleeve, trust-forming era of U. S. life, Sam Smith achieves the form and force of actuality. He joins the great company of the memorably commonplace...
...unearthed a good one. The Girl Friend is not guaranteed unconditionally, but it offers a consistently agreeable display. It has good music and unquestionably the best lyrics in town. It has a sound enough set of jokes and more than the usual allotment of brisk dancing. Eva Puck and Sam White, vaudeville favorites, are the featured entertainers. They too, if not supreme, are soundly satisfactory. They tell the story of a chicken-rancher on Long Island who became a champion six-day bicycle rider. And of his girl, who was so dumb that when he took...