Word: specimen
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Edmund Wilson was an excellent specimen of that now nearly extinct species: the all-around man of letters. During his long life (he outlived his friend and Princeton classmate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, by more than thirty years), he tried his hand at a wide variety of literary genres: from poetry and drama to fiction, journalism, history and polemics, as well as a voluminous (and decidedly indiscreet) journal. Primarily, sometimes exclusively, known as a literary critic (a fact that never failed to annoy him), he also found time to write an average of more than two-and-a-half letters...
...racial and environmental decorum upon earlier times. Consider Thomas Jefferson's descent from Enlightenment philosopher and naturalist to slave master and debaucher of Sally Hemings--a fair enough revisionist correction, if kept in disciplined perspective. Of course, one age's evil is another's routine. Meriwether Lewis, as specimen-collecting naturalist, blasted away at a condor--a barbarous breach of ecological etiquette today. (He missed.) Audubon slaughtered a thousand birds for every one he painted...
...seemed like nothing could harm him—a real physical specimen...
...this is not just any friendship. It is also a fair specimen of passive aggression. Schiller, 65, has been treated for years as a world-historical ambulance chaser. A onetime photojournalist, he has made a career of tracking down the people involved in the great public squalors of our time--the Kennedy assassination, the Manson murders, the O.J. Simpson trial--then fashioning their stories into books and TV movies that he directs. He got Jack Ruby's deathbed interview. He co-wrote Simpson's self-serving jailhouse book, I Want to Tell You. For many of those years, Mailer...
...complicating matters, Patience believes love equates with self-sacrifice and thus does not marry Grosvenor, because wedding such a perfect specimen seems selfish and the happiness derived from it grotesque...