Word: myth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...myth-maker, the symbolist, the seer of truths. I have wandered down the pedestrian centuries, beneath the bright flags, toting a bag of legends and singing the old songs. I have been Homer's eyes. I suggested Mephistopheles. They say--with some salt to be sure--that I pinched Beatrice and Dante merely followed her flight to comfort. I am the Muse, the Artist, or if you will, the Human Venture. You may think my costume outlandish and my demeanor strange; but that is your fault, not mine. I have endured...
...shot." The city-slicker writers found Roy a quiet, soft-spoken schoolteacher and ex-Army lieutenant living in a modern cottage on the Harris farm. Roy told them he was part Indian (Cherokee) and "I want to prove that I am a fighter and not a myth." They all dutifully wrote that down...
...best excuse for retelling a myth is to be unfaithful to it. When Joyce reworked the Odyssey, turning Ulysses into the Jew Leopold Bloom and the wine-dark sea into Dublin, the structure came from the past but the sense of it was all in the present-which is the essence of parable. To re-create the past as past is merely archaeology or entertainment, or both. Author Mary (The Last of the Wine) Renault's The King Must Die (a midsummer Book-of-the-Month Club choice) is both, but she is a better literary archaeologist than...
...whole myth, with all its subplots, is a good deal more labyrinthine than that, and Author Renault threads her way as skillfully through it as Theseus did through the Minotaur's cave. Much of it is a sheer adventure yarn, full of javelin-play, wrestling, bull dancing (the Cretan version of bullfighting) and those gory sudden deaths and bloody double dealings to which the ancient Greeks were so prone that they probably invented the serene idea of the "golden mean" as an antidote...
...Moral Ambiguity. As Daniels sees it, the Prince of Carpetbaggers was part scoundrel and part scapegoat and, as such, an apt symbol of the moral ambiguity of the Reconstruction period. Author Daniels argues that U.S. folklore has too gullibly enshrined the popular Southern myth of the carpetbagger as a devilish Yankee loot-and-run artist. In fact, he was sometimes a champion of Negro rights, sometimes a businessman with venture capital to invest, sometimes a restless Northern war veteran with a yen to revisit the South. If the carpetbagger's hand was plunged in the public till...