Word: twain
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...well-encrusted legend, the sources of which he "dyd take oute of certeyn bookes of frensshe and reduced it in to Englysshe." Another 400 years and the parfit gentil knights in the pious allegories of Alfred Lord Tennyson startlingly resembled iron-padded Victorian cricketers, later followed by Mark Twain's slapstick farce and the droll sophistications of John Erskine...
Cabell came closer to the era than Fitzgerald, for his symbolism grew out of America's new awareness of sex. His audience ranked him with Poe, Whitman, and Twain. He was an institution, property of campus esoterics; and a legend--a mysterious collector of medieval lore, a scholar in "forbidden topics," a familiar in strange compacts with the devil--and, wrote Carl Van Doren, a rumored participator in "misdemeanors not so spiritual...
Before opening night, this sort of plot was regarded by Broadway wiseacres as something that belongs in the theatrical graveyard. But when the opening-night curtain fell, most critics were ecstatic. "Marvelous," said the New York Times's Brooks Atkinson. "If Mark Twain could have collaborated with Vachel Lindsay, they might have devised a rhythmic lark like The Music Man, which is as American as apple pie and a Fourth of July oration." Cheered the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "The brightest, breeziest, most winning new musical to come along since My Fair Lady enchanted...
...Mark Twain's classic rules for fiction, reflected Morris in a rare burst of pedantry, included: "Employ a simple and straightforward style," "Eschew surplus age," and "Accomplish something and arrive somewhere." Why, then, did English courses of every variety let James creep in through the trap door under the lectern? Why, on the other hand, did most courses on American literature ignore Thomas Wolfe...
Little magazine post-war prose suffers the same division, except it's a gap between old and new. The old: the grand-children of Twain and illegitimate sons of Hemingway who have come to confuse the simple sentence with literature and the monosyllable with wisdom--the crude words and rugged realism of men's magazines and college sophomores. This species of literature is dying along with the subconscious-childhood reverie. The new: Jack Kerouac's bastardization of the picar-esque tradition, the hipster vocabulary, the mystic meaningless words attached to a generation, where motion is meaning and stasis is death...