Word: slights
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Description: He is pockmarked, toothbrush-mustached, wealthy, aristocratic, weak-willed, easily swayed. She is small, slight, bright-eyed, wealthy, aristocratic, intellectual, intense but unstable. Both are products of the 1930s...
Bernice Cozzens is a slight, trim woman with azure blue eyes, brown hair drawn taut in a bun, and a little-girl air of gravity. A passionately liberal Democrat, she is known as one of the shrewdest, scrappiest literary agents (annual income: about $30,000) in Manhattan, handling a stable of topflight authors, including rock-solid Republican James Gould Cozzens. Their childless marriage has been a remarkable success. While he stuck to his writing and made little money from it, she was the real breadwinner. Says Cozzens: "It could have been a humiliating situation, but I guess...
...fellow writers as softies. Says he: "The Old Man and the Sea could have run in Little Folks magazine. Under the rough exterior of Hemingway, he's just a great big bleeding heart. Sinclair Lewis was a crypto-sentimentalist and a slovenly writer who managed a slight falsification of life in order to move the reader. Faulkner falsified life for dramatic effect. It's sentimentality disguised by the corncob. I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn't read the proletarian crap that came out in the '30s; again...
...Sydney first came to me," says Althea, "I thought, this guy can't teach me anything." But, for one thing, he changed her grip from the Continental, which allows a player to make forehand and backhand shots without rotating the racket, to the Eastern grip, which requires a slight rotation of the racket but allows a smoother, more powerful swing. Above all, he gave her confidence. "I'm a Virgo," says Althea, who takes her astrology seriously. "Sydney's an Aquarius, a guy of profound perception...
...young Louis, unlike his grandfather, was clumsy, timid and stolid. A slight physical deformity made him incapable of sexual intercourse; his only real vice was gluttony, his favorite daytime amusement mixing plaster with the palace workmen. When his gay, pretty bride stepped from her coach and gave him an airy kiss, the 15-year-old "booby" only shifted gawkily from foot to foot; after the nuptials, two days later, he seemed mainly interested in the huge wedding feast. "Don't overload your stomach tonight," warned the old King. "Why not?" replied the Dauphin. "I always sleep better after...