Word: twain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...course, innocence is never wholly restored. Yet U.S. society can be amazingly resilient and forgetful. It has often shown a healing ability to forget -or, as Mark Twain had it, to "dis-remember"-the sins of the enemy as well as those of the self...
...hard to give him the last measure of commitment-and even love-that a passionate reader gives to a very few writers: (let's say) Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Twain, Melville, Yeats, Crane and yesbygod Hemingway. Is it Updike's faint tinge of smugness? Is he too much a cherisher of clever conceits? The reasons seem murkier the more they are examined, but they refuse to be examined away. What stirs these grumbles this time is the author's new collection of short stories. The book also stirs, of course, all of the old admiration: Lord, how well...
...choicest products of these years. At their dashing best, the letters read like mini-prefaces to the plays, minor skirmishes in the battle against the bourgeois that was the avowed essence of Shaw's art. Shaw laid down doctrine to his correspondents-who included Tolstoy, Strindberg and Mark Twain-like an Irish pope with a megaphone...
...another to sell watered stock to your neighbors. Irving based his swindle on the fact that his own publishers knew him and assumed that he was honest. From that misguided trust, as much as from Irving's talents as a fabricator, all else followed. Long before Hemingway, Mark Twain's Nigger Jim knew that the Hemingway hero is not to be defined in terms of yachts and blondes. "Trash," said Jim, "is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's." Otto Friedrich
Since it was founded in 1965 to promote U.S. achievements "in the realm of ideas and of the spirit," the Endowment for the Humanities has quietly granted almost $70 million, mostly for noncontroversial projects: preparing definitive editions of the works of Twain, Melville and Thoreau, editing the private papers of George Washington, filming biographies of prominent Americans for educational television. The endowment has rarely attracted public attention, though its budget grew from $2.5 million in 1966 to $38 million this year (almost one-third of it for education...