Word: supermen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Misspent Manhood. Alas, when the real Freddy Exley stands up, he proves to be singularly inept. Drunkenly, he stumbles from one football weekend to the next. The games with their supermen provide the pitiful framework for his misspent manhood. He destroys his fledgling career in publicity. He finds that his dream girl personified the materialistic, castrating American woman. His weaknesses lead him to three stays in sanatoriums. Finally, he becomes a contemporary Oblomov, spending his nights and days on couches and beds, living in the marathon shadow world of television's cultural prefabrication, and talking...
Make-Believe Alexander Pope must have been wrong, poor chap. The proper study of mankind is not man, but-in current fiction, at any rate-his phallus. Novelists are exploring ever more intimately, not to say enviously, the wondrous achievements of recognized bedroom supermen. In fact, everyone-heroes, authors, readers-seems to be getting rather exhausted. Perhaps that is why so many novels this season deal with sex in its most mechanized and dehumanized form. The dildo is the feature; everybody, apparently, uses an artificial penis, or else needs one badly...
Coach Jack Barnaby was greatly encouraged by the Crimson's performance and foresees a strong effort at Princeton this week against a team of Tigers which lacks its traditional abundance of supermen...
Richard Lindner's art comes on with the blaring oompah of a brass band. His subject is people-notably women. They are overripe nymphets whose hearts belong to Dada. Emblazoned in garish circus colors, more powerful than comic-book Supermen, his colossal caricatures loom like contemporary Baals...
...recent decades, talk of heroes seemed to carry overtones of tyranny, of Nazism's "supermen." In socialist mythology, the masses, not the individual, were regarded as heroic. In literature, the non-hero took over. He thrives in the U.S. today in the hands of such writers as Saul Bellow-whose Herzog has his great moment at the end of the book when he manages to summon enough strength to tell his cleaning woman to sweep the kitchen. Other literary "heroes" are fall guys, incipient madmen, badgered Everymen, victims. Their motto, says Daniel Aaron, professor of English at Smith, seems...