Word: upright
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Upright or Fallen? If U.S. literature consisted only of minor figures, Van Wyck Brooks would be its perfect historian. He is fine at netting the minnows: expatriate Logan Pearsall Smith, who thought to win immortality through "a perfect phrase"; Gertrude Stein, who "looked and walked like a corpulent monk" and ended by writing baby talk. But with the big fish, Brooks stumbles almost as badly as he did with Hawthorne and Melville in earlier volumes. Stephen Crane's stories and Dreiser's novels ask for far more rigorous analysis than Brooks pauses to give them...
...world that had sprung from the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions." That Pound and Eliot are gifted poets, Brooks does not question. He insists, however, that the difference between the Jeffersonians and them is nothing less than a dispute over the nature of man, "whether he [is] 'upright' or 'fallen.' " The continuance of the American tradition, says Brooks, depends on who wins the dispute. Jeffersonian Brooks is fairly confident: "A race for whom Huckleberry Finn was a hero could not be made to believe sincerely that human beings were nothing but 'miserable sinners...
Stubbs's noble conception of horseflesh was based on painstaking, back-breaking labor. Born in 1724, when the study of zoology was still rudimentary, he rented an isolated farm in Lincolnshire, and bought up a series of horse cadavers. Disregarding their gamy condition, he propped them upright with a series of bars and hooks, which allowed him to adjust the position of the legs to simulate motion. Then he dissected them muscle by muscle. After 18 months of study and a set of minutely detailed drawings, his curiosity was satisfied. One result of his studies, an elaborate tome entitled...
...fifth afternoon a lookout on the minesweeper U.S.S. Token spotted Gus Frazer, unconscious, sitting upright in the boat, his hand still near the tiller. Sammy, still alive, died half an hour after his rescue. His parents' bodies were still in the boat...
...This man for months had accosted our students, parked in front of our houses, and scared our professors' little children. A few nights before the set up, Hugh McIsaac, a wonderful, upright, American boy, a veteran, had told this man that if he didn't stop his persecution of us he would 'push him through the wall,' He said it in righteous anger, not meaning it literally, but as any red-blooded man would...