Word: iconoclastic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...bearded character known only as The Lawrenceman. It was never certain that he had ever actually read the works of D. H. Lawrence, but he had got hold of a few phrases and made brilliant use of them. There was, for instance, the occasion when a tweedy iconoclast named Cornelius Sticking loudly criticized a county family for putting on their best clothes to go to church on Sundays. The Lawrenceman merely looked out over his beard and asked mildly: "Is that a badness?" Sticking only managed to mutter something about "remarkably little to do with Christianity." The Lawrenceman went...
...wood, whose sentences are woven with a warp of aspics' fangs and woof of fire." The language came so naturally that in three years of publishing in Waco, then a town of 25,000, he built a phenomenal worldwide circulation of 120,000 for his one-man monthly Iconoclast. It also tore Waco into feuding factions, got Brann himself kidnaped, beaten and almost lynched, caned and horsewhipped at pistol point, and finally shot to death...
Last week Editor Brann was very much alive. His words smoked and crackled in the pages of Brann and the Iconoclast (University of Texas; $3.95), by Charles Carver-and burned again in Waco. The book sold briskly and set such old arguments raging as the one between Texas Naturalist Roy Bedichek, 79, and his wife. Fifty years ago, a bitter dispute over Brann's views almost broke their engagement. Shortly before the book came out, when Mrs. Bedichek learned that her husband had written its introduction, she almost broke up a dinner party with her angry objections. Brann...
...Waco, subscriptions soon deluged him in the currency of a dozen lands. The 16-page Iconoclast was a potpourri of flamboyant comment on all things, laced with spleen, belly laughs, erudition, ribaldry and scorpion satire. Often intemperate, rarely constructive, Brann could be-and was-accused of doing more harm than good. But it was hard to fault his eloquence. On the approaching marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, he mocked: "The fiancé of Miss Vanderbilt is descended...through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty...
Lawrence College's Economist Mandell Morton Bober, 65, intense, deadpan expert on Marx, general iconoclast and most quoted man on the Appleton (Wis.) campus. Sample Boberisms: "If God were half as nice to us as we are to him, we'd be living in paradise," "Businessmen have as much competition as they cannot get rid of," "Once we went to market with money in pocket and came home with goods in basket; now we go to market with money in basket and come home with goods in pocket," "If every man carried his cross, mighty few women would...