Word: twain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sign of national charisma. Either that or it's a new gauge of popularity," said Oregon Governor Tom McCall after winning the Governors' competition in the annual Calaveras County Jumping Frog Jubilee (inspired by Mark Twain's celebrated story). Thanks to a five-year-old bullfrog named John's Long Tom, McCall bested 30 rival gubernatorial frogophiles and walked away with first prize for the third time in six years. Neighboring California Governor Ronald Reagan's frog finished a dismal 20th. The booby prize in the candidates' competition went to California's Lieutenant...
Clark Clifford, an adviser to several Presidents, remembers that "on Truman's desk was the famous sign 'The Buck Stops Here,' and there was another sign quoting Mark Twain: 'Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.' That is what Mr. Truman did." Clifford can still hear the ring of Truman's voice in 1948 when his Gallup was at 36%, and he was told he faced certain political defeat unless he changed his stance on civil rights to woo the South. "I am not going to change one single...
...term only begins to describe Lincoln Steffens. Biographer Justin Kaplan does the rest with the same clarity, critical intelligence and warm grip on the American past that he demonstrated in his Pulitzer-prizewinning biography of Mark Twain. Lincoln Steffens appears at a time when the achievements of his particular brand of muckraking, like that of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair and Ray Stannard Baker, are all but forgotten. Today is the age of megamuck and a more sophisticated breed of raker. With the exception of Watergate, the corrective campaigns of S.S. McClure's magazine, where Steffens and his colleagues launched...
...DeVoto always felt himself an outsider. He was a compulsive worker who produced more than 230 magazine pieces before he was 40-plus four novels, a volume of essays and the book that made his reputation, Mark Twain's America. He was capable of hacking out 30,000 words in a fecund week of writing romantic serial fiction for the Saturday Evening Post under the pen name "John August," scribbling in panic before the "manias, depression and blue funks" as well as the living expenses that pursued him. (DeVoto had a fondness for domestic help, new Buicks and private...
...tail, many people bought gas masks and "comet pills" to prevent asphyxiation; they also staged a round of end-of-the-world parties. But the gases were far too tenuous to do any damage, and the earth remained unscathed. One famous prediction, however, did come to pass. Mark Twain, who had been born during the comet's previous visitation in 1835, and wrote that he expected to die during its next ("The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks, they came in together, they must go out together.' "), died only...