Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Pioneer, the Golden Era, the Overland Monthly, the Californian were such resourceful amateurs as Sam Brannon, wildcat Mormon leader who got rich collecting tithes from gold prospectors; Ferdinand C. Ewer, tall, goateed, atheist Harvardman who later became an Episcopal rector; Charles Henry Webb, lisping, redheaded ex-sailor and miner, wit and lady-killer, who fled to California to escape the Civil War. (In the second year of the war, 100,000 army deserters and pacifists rolled into California. Among them was a slouchy ex-river pilot named Samuel Clemens...
...carbon copy, not a sequel, yet not entirely a fresh and uninfluenced cinema, Daughters Courageous has a coltish, unaffected charm, considerable wit, an ill-concealed admiration for its two picaresque but impossible male mainstays. Not calculated to stir up too much emotion, one scene in it will nevertheless bring goose-pimples to many a tough-bearded male. The scene: the girls, barbering their stepfather-elect, shaving downwards over his Adam's apple...
...Gogarty, "wittiest man in Dublin, has a sharp tongue and a thin skin. Two months ago the famed surgeon-poet-Senator-wit collected ?100 libel damages from poor Irish Poet Patrick" Kavanagh. Immortalized in Joyce's Ulysses (1922) as Malachi Mulligan, Gogarty declared that Joyce had perpetrated a gross libel. The Mulligan portrait, said its original, was a brutalized version showing only the bawdy side of his wit; Joyce had maliciously muted his subtler accomplishments, such as his poetry, his witty out-talking of Dublin's best talkers...
Author West starts off well, with wit, a nimble imagination, shrewd slants on the social roots of Hollywood's crackpottery. But well before the last scene-a world première which turns into a savage riot-his intended tragedy turns into screwball grotesque, and groggy Author West can Barely distinguish fantastic shadows from fantastic substance. At a similar stage of Tying to get Hollywood on paper, William Saroyan before him merely folded his arms, admitted with rare humility that Hollywood had given him "the smiling heart of an idiot and the good nature of a high-class phony...
Practically every field of honest and, possibly, questionable, endeavor is included among the remaining vocations. Manufacturing, education, insurance and merchandising draw over five from the class. The usual amount of dry wit is present in one man's statement that he wants to be a beach-comber, and author's that he intends to become a "raconteur"-Dwight Fiske...