Word: tess
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...Thomas Hardy was at the summit of his novelist's career. Such dark-grained, tragic stories as The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles had won him a place second only to George Meredith among the late Victorians. They had also won him a handsome income; Hardy, the son of a poor stonemason, earned enough to build a comfortable home in his native Dorset, where he suffered the tongue of his shrewish wife, walked the countryside, and gloomed over the fate of man in an inhospitable universe...
...critical uneasiness grew. Why did he have to be so depressing, so frank about sex? Answered Hardy: "The crash of broken commandments is as necessary ... to the catastrophe of tragedy as the noise of drums and cymbals to a triumphal march." Not all his readers saw it so; when Tess came out as a serial, many of them wrote Hardy begging for a happy ending. He could not satisfy them, for life, as he felt it, has no happy endings...
...Pronounced (in Tennessee, at least): Ess-tess Kee-fawver...
...Alabama-raised, Editor Cohen, 51, was brilliant enough to graduate from Yale at 19 and become managing editor of a small bimonthly, the Menorah Journal, at 24. While editing it for seven years, he showed a sharp eye for new talent, printed the first work of Lionel Trilling, Tess Slesinger, Albert Halper, Meyer Levin and a dozen other writers...
...Died. Tess Gardella, 52, 300-lb. blues singer and actress-in-black-face (the Scandals, Show Boat), known to millions as "Aunt Jemima"; of diabetes; in Brooklyn...