Word: wyck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. F. van Wyck Mason, 76, prolific and bestselling historical novelist (among his more than 60 books: Three Harbours, Stars on the Sea, Cutlass Empire); of a heart attack while swimming; near Southampton, Bermuda. A skilled storyteller especially interested in colonial and Civil War America, Mason embellished his complex plots with minute detail and romantic flourish. He also penned a popular series of tales of intrigue featuring Captain (later Major and Colonel) Hugh North, and during World War II served as chief military historian for Dwight Eisenhower's SHAEF command...
Following graduation and a six-month sojourn in Europe, Reed settled down in Greenwich Village where he got a job on Max Eastman's New Masses. Here Reed came into contact with artists and intellectuals--Van Wyck Brooks, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Max Weber, and Eugene O'Neill among them--who pushed the tenor of political consciousness in the Village toward the Left...
...gossip about F. Marion Crawford was that he read Italian aloud to Mrs. Gardner, Crawford wrote many romantic novels, one concerned with Boston and Mrs. Jack called The American Politician. Van Wyck Brooks had pictured New England after the Civil War as an Indian Summer; Crawford had seasonally pictured this Boston lady as "summer days and flowers and wind-blown water and the happy rustle of spring leaves...
...from corrupting grammar to corrupting minors. But the decline and fall of the republic has seldom been laid at his study door. Nobody has flattered a man of letters by calling him a major danger to the state since the time during World War II when Archibald MacLeish, Van Wyck Brooks and others accused T.S. Eliot & Co. of demoralizing the fighters for democracy by having scribbled so depressingly about the "Waste Land" 20 years before...
...CRITICIZES the indivious pushme-pullyou competitiveness of our economic system-and, as a result, the stifling individualism and aloofness each of us has felt. We are a nation of individuals, as Van Wyck Brooks observed, "cast inward upon our own insufficient selves." The uptightness is exacerbated by the disappearance of mitigating institutions, where we could take refuge from our terror- stricken aloneness. The extended family, the stable local neighborhood, where solace from this separateness and impersonality might have been found, are passing from the American scene...