Word: vicious
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Vicious Circle, by Margaret Case Harriman. A lighthearted anecdotal roundup about the bright bunch that met at the Algonquin in the '20s and '30s for food, talk and character assassination (TIME, March...
...chief characters, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt and First Sergeant Milton Anthony Warden are both good soldiers, thirty-year men who love the Army. Prewitt suffers from a naive belief that he has retained some individual rights; throughout the book, the Army's dealings with him consist of a vicious, continued assault on his self-respect. After brutal treatment in a disciplinary Stockade, Pewitt kills a guard and goes AWOL; in the end, he is shot by MP's while trying to rejoin his unit after Pearl Harbor...
...Said It? Margaret Case Harriman has culled the anecdotage about the Round Table, sifted her own recollections, and bound it all into a lively book. The Vicious Circle is neither weighty nor frowningly significant, but it is about people who were intensely and hilariously alive, many of them brilliant, most of them naturals...
They called themselves the Vicious Circle, and one day as they trooped out after lunch-Robert Sherwood, Dorothy Parker, George Kaufman, Bob Benchley, Heywood Broun and the rest-a pressagent paid them his passing respects. "There," said he, "goes the greatest collection of unsalable wit in America." Not too long after, most of them were naming their own prices...
...Vicious Circle's gags ran from harmless to vicious. Dorothy Parker, who once hung up the sign MEN on her office door because she was lonely, was also one of the champion acid-throwers. Said she to a lady writer who bragged about holding her husband for seven years: "Don't worry, if you keep him long enough he'll come back in style." Franklin P. Adams was generally somewhat kinder. Asked how Harold Ross, no beauty, had looked tobogganing over the weekend, F.P.A. replied: "Well, you know how he looks NOT tobogganing...