Word: splendid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jackson J. Benson, who teaches American literature at San Diego State University, cannot abide people saying this. He has written his enormous biography to prove the unprovable-that Steinbeck wrote many splendid novels before and after The Grapes of Wrath, justifying the Nobel Prize he received in 1962. Benson's admirations exclude only East of Eden; the biographer finds it stilted and overwrought. If Steinbeck did not produce as many great novels as he should have, Benson blames his editor or his agent and, above all, the critics, who kept asking for more Grapes...
Late in the week Wick got public support from a close friend, the President. Said Reagan: "He has done a splendid job. I think the whole USIA is far superior to anything that has ever been, and he's going to continue there." Perhaps Reagan phoned his views to Wick, who just might have put them on the record...
...them tend to be subjective. A strong though eccentric case might be made for the final utterance of Britain's Lord Chief Justice Gordon Hewart, who died on a spring morning in 1944 with the words "Damn it! There's that cuckoo again!" Tallulah Bankhead used a splendid economy of language at her parting in New York City's St. Luke's Hospital in 1968. "Bourbon," she said. The Irish writer Brendan Behan rose to the occasion in 1964 when he turned to the nun who had just wiped his brow and said, "Ah, bless...
Finland is a country of fewer than 5 million people, and there are more saunas than ice rinks. Though he is the finest hockey player the Finns have ever exported to North America, Kurri returns home each spring to a pleasant obscurity. He is a splendid skater, a strong outside shooter, an artful stickhandler and a responsible back checker. Judging right wingers, Gretzky puts Kurri in a class with the New York Islanders' Mike Bossy. Among all-round players, he may even rate with the Islanders' Bryan Trottier. Kurri does not care to be lumped with the other...
...Great White Way, some 60 gospel shouters are shaking the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the soaring sounds of religious fervor. The Gospel at Colonus is an unlikely enterprise: the story of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus as it might be enacted by a black evangelical congregation on a splendid Sunday morning. Sophocles' theme was man's acceptance of the inevitability of death; Adapter-Director Lee Breuer's is the black man's and woman's reconciliation to a hard life in these United States. If Breuer's staging is occasionally drab and tentative...