Word: wickford
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
George Apley may have been a snob-but he also had something for which his creator had undisguised admiration: "Essential and undeviating discipline of background." Wickford Point came even closer to home. It was the story of a popular writer, a Harvard graduate, reacting against the decadence and futile ancestor worship of his tumble-down New England family. And if the hero had the unmistakable air of the author himself-the pipe-smoking, tweedy, dressed-by-Brooks-Brothers blueblood-the hero's family was also unquestionably Marquand...
...narrow social sensibility that one usually associates with the "Old Grad" type. Clubs, the "Pudding," and afternoon tea at prominent Boston houses are the essential activities of George Apley at Harvard. With very minor variations, this type of society is the one that Marquand writes about when, as in Wickford Point and Sincerely, Willis Wayde, he turns specifically to Harvard. It would be silly to base a general criticism of Marquand on the fact that he does not give an entirely accurate picture of the contemporary undergraduate; he is writing about the Harvard that he knew...
Novelist John P. Marquand lost a legal fight to buy out the interests of six cousins in a 46-acre ancestral estate (scene of his Wickford Point) in Newburyport, Mass. Marquand, who had argued that he could not live in peace with relatives setting up summer homes all over the place, was left with two houses and only 15 acres...
...Wickford Point, which he finished next, he drew on Newburyport detail, conventionally disguised, for "a story on the various relationships of a family." Some of Marquand's own family thought he drew too close. His cousins the Hales, and Renee Oakman Bradbury decided that they had been drawn to the life, that Wickford Point itself was the old family estate of Curzon Mill. Spurred in part by a sense of having served as Marquand's models, the cousins have so far successfully blocked Marquand in a project on which he has his heart set: purchase of the whole...
Insists Marquand: "I still don't think [Wickford] is like my family." But, Apley and Wickford included, his best writing has been about the lives and locales he has known from boyhood. He thinks B.F.'s Daughter, which preceded Point of No Return, failed to come off because its locale, wartime Washington, was a transient experience for him. The middle-class axis he draws on best runs from Newburyport to Boston to New York...