Word: strains
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...without a country, or feels he is. Illegitimate son of a sporty Italo-American lawyer-millionaire and a destitute Kentucky belle, he spends his boyhood caroming around Europe. When he gets to the U.S. and Harvard Law School, the strain of being a "wop" makes him as sensitive as his bastardy. The pinch of his father's dwindling fortune makes him self-reliant, and his jumps through the rusty hoops of experience set up by Novelist Dos Passos make him a bore. Examples: Jay's first impotent foray into sex with a Greenwich Village "free love" addict...
Sole credit for this fantastic upsurge belongs to the men of the team. Certainly the newspapers did not strain themselves to lend encouragement. Even after the Army win, Arthur Daley of the New york Times referred to "hapless Harvard," and Life magazine snidely remarked that "the impossible has happened, Harvard won a football game." But the squad went on about its business...
...nightspot bar on Key West's Duval Street, a full-bloused songstress named Rae Waller was tickling the patrons' ears with a new song about Harry Truman. (Sample verse: "Bar pianos strain their glands/For the touch of Harry's hands.") Yet while the song poked fun at him, Key West's most important tourist was more than welcome in the southernmost city...
...Korean war, the U.S. had fallen 80% behind in its promised deliveries of heavy arms to Europe. Britain and the West Europeans did at least as badly in making good their promises; their economies were groaning under the load, and their politicians were making capital out of the strain...
...Amazonian Lady Macbeth of brute strength and indomitable will; her strength seems to be drawn from an immense source of nervous energy. This, joined with her sensitivity and fragile beauty, makes it seem impossible that she should last as long as she does under the same strain of guilt which overcomes Macbeth. The sleep-walking scene, when the sham is gone and there is nothing left but the subconscious, is the finest moment of the play...