Word: self
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...happened in a single year, just a half-century ago. The dark days seemed to have ended at last -- the years of the Depression and the dust bowl -- and Americans were regaining their pride and self-confidence. They had touched bottom, but they had pulled themselves up. As the '30s ended, the New York World's Fair summed up the nation's suddenly buoyant mood with its official march, Dawn of a New Day. And who, in the atmosphere of optimism that marked the start of 1939, could have doubted that...
...directors and scriptwriters -- both William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald were employed in Hollywood that year -- were severely restricted, moreover, by Hollywood's rigid code of self-censorship. Long kisses were forbidden, adultery always had to be severely punished, and double beds were for sinners in New York City. In Hollywood movies, even happily married couples, like Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series, slept in widely separated twin beds, clad top to bottom in pajamas or nightgown. Such now innocuous four-letter words as hell and damn were proscribed, and Gone With the Wind titillated and sometimes...
...SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS by John Updike; Knopf; 257 pages...
...Self-Consciousness is neither a straightforward autobiography nor a decisive pre-emptive strike against future chronicles. There will surely be biographies of Updike someday, all of which, if they are any good, will draw heavily from this book of revelations. Updike's candor is not of the scandalous or titillating sort. Rather, the six essays assembled here piece together a fascinating self-portrait of an evolving sensibility, of a mind learning to love the world from which it feels, for several reasons, estranged...
...sustain a writer book after book." His first attempts to put this secret into words were, he gently suggests, sometimes misunderstood: "My own style seemed to me a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the complexity of envisioned phenomena and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is exactly what it wasn't -- other-indulgent, rather...