Word: squalidity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Shrove Tuesday in New Orleans. Early on this Mardi Gras morning, before the white folks' Rex comes in splendor to Canal Street, the Negroes are having their own carnival. Up squalid New Basin glides a barge, canopied in sacking, to the wharf at Rampart Street and Howard Avenue. Off the barge strides the King of the Zulus, right royal in black underwear, a hula skirt of sea grass, a tin crown. His sceptre is a broomstick, topped by a snow-white rooster. Preceding him is his Queen, behind are his capering dukes. The King mounts his throne-a decrepit...
...conspicuous little frog in the national pond, Maury Maverick went home vowing to become the biggest frog in San Antonio. He formed a Fusion party (named after Fiorello LaGuardia's in New York) and went after Mayor Quin's machine. He centred his campaign on the squalid life of San Antonio's peon pecan shellers (the biggest voting bloc), got Eleanor Roosevelt down to look at them, accused Quin & Co. of a long list of offenses at least one of which -padding the city payroll with 555 voters -brought Quin an indictment (later quashed). Mayor Quin replied...
This story reverses that of the convict-the doctor, too, is trying to erect barriers against nature-and the sick, squalid, miserable sequence of events he goes through contrasts with the nightmarish but still exhilarating adventures of the convict. It does not come off: the doctor and his mistress are not credible characters, the prose is turgid and confusing. But not even careless writing can weaken the cumulative effect of Faulkner's imaginative fertility, the boldness and originality of his themes...
...accounts of the South's shortcomings by itinerant northern journalists, Reporter Ashmore decided to spend his two-week vacation in "the deep North to see how they managed to cast the first stone."* New York City, the indignant reporter found, was the "sweatshop capital of America," its slums squalid and crime-breeding. New England's textile cities seemed to him "not far from being industrial ghost cities." In Philadelphia, he found more slums and "the universal fear" that industry would move away. In the shadow of Bethlehem's steel mills he saw "filth and depravity...
...lies on the delta of the Pearl River, in the centre of a broad rice-growing valley. A municipal paradox, the city's wide, clean boulevards lined with modern apartments and shops run parallel with filthy, unpaved alleys, so narrow that three people cannot walk abreast, lined with squalid one-story hovels. Fully one-third of the city's 1,000,000 Chinese live on dirty, water-logged sampans, jam-packed along the river fronts...