Word: thompson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...part of the three-disc set Max Allan Collins' Black Box). "I think he's a phenomenon in regard to the whole explosion of the mass-market paperback, and was probably its first great star." Spillane's popularity spawned a generation of tough-guy, "paperback-original" novelists - Jim Thompson, Charles Williams and a raft of others whose works were filmed by the French New Wave directors...
...They wrote genre fiction. The New Yorker critic (and novelist) Edmund Wilson could find "the boys in the back room" lacking. Then came another irony. Later generations of critics threw off their pretensions and mined the gritty glories of pulp fiction; they cogently argued that Hammett and Chandler, and Thompson and David Goodis and others, were worth cherishing (and that writers like Wilson, who's forgotten today as a novelist, weren't.) Yet in this rush to validate the pulps, Spillane was curiously forgotten - a prophet without honor. But with profit. Those royalties kept rolling...
...1950s authors? And how does it mesh with the nation's grand romance of the open road? After all, travelers from Walt Whitman to Jack Kerouac have done time on earlier American roads, portraying them variously as pathways to freedom or into a Hobbesian wilderness. And more recently, Hunter Thompson, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen and other myth-makers have tried to hustle the Interstates into that same picaresque canon...
...whaleships' masters aboard their unarmed vessels had little choice but to comply with the Confederates, who that day and for the past few weeks, had stubbornly refused to believe the reports that had reached them of the war's end. Indeed, the master of the William Thompson, one of the captured whalers, recalled that a Confederate officer "exultantly stated that he did not believe Lee had surrendered...
...Japan The Japanese had no need for diamonds. The engagement ring had no place in their historical notion of romance. No rings were ever exchanged. But in the mid-1960s, the De Beers cartel looked at Japan and saw potential. The J. Walter Thompson advertising agency was hired to flood the Japanese media with advertising touting the rings as a symbol of Western sexuality and prosperity. In 1966 less than 1% of Japanese women received a diamond ring when they married. By 1981 that figure had rocketed to 60%. And after another decade of sustained advertising, close...