Word: swithin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Pulham embodies the reflections of a Boston investment counsel when his 25th Class Reunion Committee asks him for a brief biography of his life. Back goes the camera into his well-to-do Boston upbringing, his "carryon" prep-school days at St. Swithin's; Harvard and culture; World War I and the Argonne; Manhattan and the advertising business; the girl he loved (Hedy Lamarr); his easy, fateful slide into his late father's (Charles Coburn) sinecure; his passionless marriage to his mother's choice (Ruth Hussey); his slightly bewildered, slightly querulous, slightly pathetic acceptance of his fate...
...life, for he ended just where he started -in the horse-&-buggy age, without the addition of very much plumbing. Yet here in my own life, which is not entirely over, I am already in an entirely different world." A well-to-do upbringing full of Tennysonian sentiments, St. Swithin's prep school ("Play up-and play the game"), Harvard clubs, Boston society and Maine coast summers equipped Harry Pulham with snobberies and ideals for living in Boston of the 1890s. Suddenly he found himself an infantry lieutenant in France, an advertising man in cynical post-war Manhattan...