Word: upper
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more profound theme is at work here, signaled by still other literary antecedents. Emulating Henry James' Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, whose admonition is "Live all you can," Amy vows to escape the suffocating restrictions of the bloodless upper class: "Amy was alive; Amy throbbed. For what was life but wanting to live?" Auchincloss's penchant for the portentous flourish has never been more in evidence; in the spirit of a self-help manual rather than a heroine, Amy proclaims to Fidler's wife: "I exist. I feel. You're the one who's concerned...
...Louis Auchincloss so popular? Gore Vidal claims, in a celebrated essay, that Auchincloss is our great chronicler of the upper classes, "the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs." Perhaps readers have wearied, Vidal suggests, of novelists who insist that only the immigrant story deserves to be told or devote themselves to tedious proclamations of selfhood while ignoring the class whose legend is writ in the Social Register. Despite his considerable failings as a novelist, Auchincloss does for that class what John O'Hara...
...thing, the goalpost didn't look so hot. I didn't know whether it was bad vibes from too many rehearsals of "Mandy" or what, but the old boy was really wilting. Among other things, the cross bar and two upper poles had been shorn, giving the poor guy the B-school barber shop look...
...Although they dressed like Napoleon and Josephine, they identified themselves with the descamisados, the shirtless poor who supported Perón from 1946-55. It was a classic case of gilt by association. Both Peróns came up from the bottom, and their ostentation and tantrums against the upper classes provided vicarious thrills for the masses they left behind...
...jobs that involve ties. In William Inge's Picnic, Hal Carter speaks wistfully of a job "in a nice office where I can wear a tie and have a sweet little secretary." When dressing up, blue collar workers often like a loud yell of garish color, while upper middle class men tend toward more discretion...