Word: whitmans
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...attract him to the sport. "It was so great; I just thought it was so impressive . . . being a fighter." So he gathered his courage and went out for Golden Gloves. "When I won the first time [age 16, a lanky middleweight], it came over the announcements at school [Walt Whitman High]. Sitting in homeroom, I got goose bumps all over my arms and legs...
...Mardi, all by a young novelist named Herman Melville (1819-91). Nearly 33,000 copies have been printed, shipped and readied for sale. And that is not all. Three look-alike companions are also hot off the presses and speeding toward dealers: the complete poetry and prose of Walt Whitman (1819-92), the tales and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) and three novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96). They will soon be available in U.S. bookstores, at $25 apiece...
Also pending is the question of solvency, once the initial funds are gone. Will new subsidies appear? Or can the library somehow become selfsupporting? Answers are several years away. In the meantime, readers can watch Melville develop into the author of Moby Dick and observe Whitman tinkering with and expanding Leaves of Grass. All of Hawthorne's eerie, ambiguous short fiction can be tucked into a purse or briefcase. Harriet Beecher Stowe never looked better, nor did Uncle Tom's Cabin, the melodramatic novel that abetted a war. That is not a bad beginning for a publishing project...
...couple of rules may apply to generalizations about excellence: 1) all recollections of past excellence should be discounted by at least 50%; memory has its tricks of perspective; 2) what might be called the Walt Whitman Rule: exuberant democratic energy usually finds its own standards and creates its own excellence, even though the keepers of the old standards may not like the new. A Big Mac may sometimes surpass the concoctions of Julia Child...
Americans have historically (with a touch of of overstatement) regarded themselves as the world's master exaggerators: spinners of all tall tales, an abundantly fabulous people, full of Whitman and vinegar. But this is probably mere cultural narcissism. Other people have spent many centuries perfecting their techniques of overstatment. The French for all their Cartesian precision have a strangely unstable hyperbolic side; a casual acquaintance who cannot make it to lunch one day will tell you he is "desolate" because of it. Such linguistic inflation can leave people with their vocabularies depleted when hard times come; what is that...