Word: wasps
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...movie is set in Montreal from the late 1940s onward into the first pale years of the '50s. Buddy's father (Jack Warden) is a taxi driver. His brother is a pre-med student practically numb with the wish to be a WASP, to let the Jewishness drain out of him and get a life-supporting transfusion of blue blood. Buddy, just out of high school, works in a summer resort, tries running a roulette game on the sly, is hoodwinked into smuggling heroin for a fat-fingered hood, concocts on his own all sorts of wild-eyed...
...generally operated on the theory of a laissez-faire of merit. Despite its injustices?the disastrous schooling of the poor, for example?the diverse system has remained sufficiently open to allow leadership to rise from nearly every rank of the society. In fact, the WASP establishment has long wondered what went wrong, how it lost control to the coarse ethnic heirs of Jacksonianism. The dispossessed of American life are to be found in The Education of Henry Adams as well as The Autobiography of Malcolm...
Shepard, Putney and Cox is a high Wasp law firm, dominated, in an odd way, by Beeky Ehninger, a wealthy, well-connected robber baron descendant. Twenty-five years before, Beeky Ehninger had saved the firm by reorganizing it, and now it is facing a similar crisis. In the trauma of merging the law firm with an even bigger and more profitable factory. Auchincloss reveals the personalities of the various partners, associates, and wives. They come across as a pretty average group of people; people who may work a little harder, suffer from a few more neuroses and have a little...
...best popular critics going, as well as the editor of the New York Times Book Review section, but takes some getting used to in Leonard's fiction. In Black Conceit, for example, Leonard offers three different major characters: New Englander Kenneth Mackenzie Coffin, a young Wasp of means, qualms and wavering commitment to the New Left; Coffin's brilliant wife Marcy, a nice enough Texas girl caught in the coils of biology and history, who is not unfairly described as "a graduate student of herself; and Rinsler, a cynical organizer for The Movement. A reader soon finds, though...
...weapon everyone is pointing at here is politics, specifically left-wing popular-front politics in the 1940s. The script by Playwright Arthur Laurents (Time of the Cuckoo) posits an improbable, if not preposterous relationship between a WASP jock-frat man (Robert Redford), who is, on the side, an incredibly sensitive writer, and a Jewish Stalinist campus radical (Barbra Streisand), who is, on the side, a novice earth mother. A great deal of pushing and hauling gets them from college to marriage to Hollywood in time for the anti-Red witch hunts. The purpose, one imagines, was to have the apolitical...