Word: townes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Texas is not without its farming operators. Down around Corpus Christi they are known as "windshield" farmers; they live in town, and about the only time they ever see the old home place is when they drive by on the way to the airport, where they take off for New York City or Paris, where they buy booze and Cézannes...
Seen superficially, Arthur Winner needs no more education. He is a successful lawyer in his 50s, a figure of Roman rectitude, a bald, grave patrician, sage and self-contained. In his middle-sized home town of Brocton (possibly located in Pennsylvania), he belongs to a comfortable upper class that has the attitudes if not the acreage of landed gentry. Within a 49-hour period, fissures of revelation about Winner's closest friends-and about himself-rip open this safe and stolid world, and almost swallow...
Love and the law: those are the story's opposed forces, and much of their contention centers around Brocton's old courthouse, its pillared cupola flanked by great trees, its tolling tower bell pacing life in the town. In the gallery of lawyers serving beneath the bell, the outstanding figure is Noah Tuttle, Winner's senior partner, a doughty old lion of the law in his white-maned 80s, crotchety, plainspoken, a portable archive of torts, statutes and the cumulative wisdom...
...year-old reporter named Lucius Beebe from the now defunct Boston Telegram came to interview the 20-year-old author, and the two were soon painting the town mauve. "We lived on gin and Swinburne," recalls Beebe. "Jim had delusions of grandeur when it came to money. When he called on a girl, he would put on a morning coat and striped pants, hire a car and get a million orchids - all of it charged and seldom paid...
...Life Drive rather better than he does his patients. Men and Brethren features a tough-minded Episcopal rector who copes with the eternal muddle of sin without sentimentalizing the sinner. The Just and the Unjust, the best U.S. novel ever fashioned around the law, focuses on a small-town murder trial; it illuminates both the law's technicalities and its larger meaning, its limitations and its glories (which are often the same thing). Guard of Honor, the best of U.S. World War II novels, revolves around a delicate problem in white-Negro race relations at a Florida air base...