Word: legend
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Large Legend. Turning back unescorted, the C-118 jettisoned 1,800 gallons of fuel so that it could touch down safely at Tachikawa. There it found a one-man, three-star welcoming committee on hand. General Burns had driven eight miles from his home in Fuchu to put the Platts off, put the bumped airmen back on, and order an investigation. Last week, the investigation over, a six-officer board blamed "administrative error," found Platt innocent of bumping the G.I.s, pointed to the fact that the Pacific Express had indeed gone off with eight empty seats-just as the colonel...
Sentimental Legend. Some of this involves the novel in dense thickets of Marxist homiletics. But two things in Wolfe's fictional chronicle are intriguing in human terms. One is the sense of Trotsky-Rostov's real devotion to his wife. The other is his personal gentleness and charm. He kept pet rabbits (one was called George Sand), which had been bought to give the household its own supply of meat, but which, when it came to the point, the author of The Defense of Terrorism could not bear to have killed...
...same time, something of a more deeply problematic nature is happening to the western legend. Good and Evil, it seems, are beginning to understand each other, to be reconciled to each other's existence. Often in the modern western a sudden sympathy flashes between hero and villain, as though somehow they feel themselves to be secret sharers in a larger identity. Often the hero cannot bring himself to kill the villain until fate forces his hand, and then he performs the act almost like a religious sacrifice (Shane...
...admirers with some unpleasant surprises. Billy the Kid, of sentimental memory, was a psychopathic killer who dropped most of his 21 victims from ambush or tampered with their guns before he picked a fight; and he was not even fast on the draw. Jesse James, no matter what the legend says, never gave a buffalo nickel to the poor. Wes Hardin, the tiny Texan who was probably the most dangerous gunman in the West, was as mean as a mountain boomer; he had killed twelve men before he started to shave, and by the time he was mercifully shot...
...Novels. The trouble with most of the famous gunskinners was that they started to believe their own publicity. The legend of the West was growing almost as fast as the reality. The dime novels, with a bow to James Fenimore Cooper, had begun to give a first, rough literary form to the western story. By 1890 the "flesh-times in Kansas" were a thing of the past. Wild Bill Hickok had been tamed by Writer-Promoter Ned Buntline, and was playing in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show ("Fear not, fair maid, you are safe at last with...