Word: wasteland
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Alaska was called "Seward's Folly" and "The Ice-Box of the North" because Secretary of State William Henry Seward bought the land from Russia for $7,200,000 (7? per acre) and everyone knew it was a wasteland of ice and snow, inhabited only by wolves and Eskimos...
...than Portia, malicious, cynical, charming, he is that far more complex character, the corrupt innocent, who "had gone wrong through dealing with other people in terms that he found later were not their own." To him, Portia's innocence is a last oasis in the world's wasteland. But he plays her false with another girl, compromises her with everybody, ironically completes his betrayal when he refuses her love, saying she has the same ulterior motives as everybody else...
...year 1922 was a big year for modern literature. In that year appeared T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Joyce's Ulysses, Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, the first (English-translated) volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The other literary landmark of that year was a startling encyclopedia, edited by Harold Stearns, called Civilization in the United States, the collective work of some 30 outspoken "young intellectuals," including such names as H.L. Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford. The startling thing about the book was the contributors' pessimism. While the press, economists and politicians glorified...
...land enough for everybody. So, too, to radio pioneers there seemed to be wave lengths enough for all comers. Firstcomers, who had their pick, staked out their claims on the easy frequencies, the most readily exploitable wave lengths. Ultrashort waves (frequencies of 30,000 kilocycles and higher) were the wasteland. It was known that they were reliably effective only as far as the horizon, a paltry range for services which sought to blanket the whole earth...
...total sale of about 10,000,000 copies. After thoughtfully picking them to little bits, Professor Whipple concluded that their enormous popularity did not constitute a serious reflection on U. S. taste. Zane Grey's tireless riders of the purple sage, lone star rangers and wanderers of the wasteland, he decided, were interesting for a curious reason: They were like the heroes of some folk tale that had never quite got written. Nobody would compare the stories of Zane Grey to Beowulf, but before Beowulf there were probably generations of crude popular storytellers, handing on the same legends, gradually...