Word: wyck
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Parson Weems has been remembered by generations of Americans only as the man -presumably a dust-dry, thin-lipped little pedant-who invented or at least popularized the most famous lie in U.S. history: the fable of George Washington and the cherry tree. As revived by Van Wyck Brooks in The World of Washington Irving, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems appears to have been an attractive and useful citizen. A cheerful, ruddy-faced clergyman who had given up his parish to become a book agent (the Episcopal Church in the South was demoralized after the Revolution), Parson Weems...
Hence, for any plain reader who may have been scared away by Author Brooks's reputation as the nation's most distinguished literary critic, Irving is an excellent place to begin his history. Van Wyck (rhymes with bike) Brooks is no mere dissector of dead tomes. In Irving, as in its two predecessors, the task which he has set himself is nothing less than to recreate the whole intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the period. Few Americans will read it without a thrill of discovery at learning how much more lively, vigorous and original an intellectual life...
...such richly colorful material, woven into a narrative that is never schematic, and yet never a mere miscellaneous grab bag of historical information, is Van Wyck Brooks's book constructed. Its individual word-portraits-of Alexander Wilson, the dour ornithologist and bird-painter, of Davy Crockett, teller of tall backwoods tales, who thought they made a book "jump out of the press like a new dollar from a mint-hopper," of Fenimore Cooper, whose father gave him 23 farms in New York State when the future novelist was expelled from Yale-are equal to Brooks's best...
...fellow craftsmen who know him consider him the most skilled practitioner of a most difficult kind of book reviewing. Critic Van Wyck Brooks, when he edited the Freeman, said that Lisle Bell had invented a new form, ranked him with highbrow Scottish Critic Edwin Muir. Poet Marianne Moore, who edited the Dial's brief booknotes for the ten years Bell contributed, called one cluster of his reviews the best thing she had seen. The reason why Reviewer Bell has never received recognition for his services to U.S. letters: his 17,000 reviews have been written as a sideline, while...
Authorizing two minor sports credits for golf, Clarence B. Van Wyck, Secretary to the Department of Physical Education, has officially launched Harvard's newest team. Negotiations have been completed with the Oakley Country Club for a special forty dollar membership to take effect immediately and to run through Labor...