Word: tarkingtonian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Rensselaer, Charlie Halleck led a pleasantly Tarkingtonian life, hunting coons and skunks in the nearby Kankakee marsh, mowing neighbors' lawns for spending money, playing halfback on the high school football team and run sheep run in the meadow back of his home. In political fact. Halleck was running as soon as he learned to walk. He cannot remember when he first decided to spend his life in pursuit of high office. But his ambition was plain for all to see. Said Rensselaer High School's yearbook...
There could be a terrifying play in what the fantasies of a Tarkingtonian small boy could give rise to in a totalitarian society: the scene in The Emperor's Clothes where two goons grill the father about Hoot Gibson's war on "the cattle barons is a frightening reductio ad absurdum of police state methods. But what might have been a brilliantly sardonic social satire has first been squeezed inside a domestic framework and then dropped from the picture itself. Though the family story has its own realistic interest, it is never made real. Mixing and garnishing...
...lovesick Willie, Kenneth Nelson has his Tarkingtonian moments, captures some of the fearful gentility and capering solemnity of one whose heart may or may not be breaking, but whose voice unquestionably is. Harrison Muller is a show-stopper as the superior Yaleman who breezes in for a visit in his Winton 6. But various long-suffering grown-ups just go through stock-company motions, and that great pioneer in brathood, Willie's kid sister Jane, today seems just another brat. Ann Crowley, who is a pleasant enough ingenue as Lola, seldom becomes Tarkington's baby-talking, beau-snatching...