Word: background
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Centres. Beyond keeping artists at work under capable direction, Holger Cahill had two principal aims for the Art Project: 1) to clarify, by research, "the native background of the arts," and 2) to break up the big city monopoly on Art by getting people all over the U. S. interested in art as an everyday part of living and working. To accomplish the first aim, the Index of American Design was set up in January 1936, and to date has employed about 500 watercolorists and draftsmen in digging up old wood carving, weathervanes, costumes, toys, needlework, china, and other craft...
Hesketh Pearson is an impressionable, aggressive English biographer and actor, a hater of psychology, politics, literary "style," for whom "two and two equal any sum that takes my fancy." This last credo has made his biographies (Doctor Darwin, Tom Paine, Gilbert and Sullivan) lively with anecdotes, slack on background. A onetime clerk who answered his boss's questions with quotations from Shakespeare, Pearson began his theatrical career under Beerbohm Tree, whose advice consisted mainly of such enigmatic nonsense as telling him not to suck his thumb. As an actor, he had one brief success, when he substituted...
Gateway (Twentieth Century-Fox). Grand Hotel melodrama against an Ellis Island background, with Don Ameche, Arleen Whelan, Gregory Ratoff, Binnie Barnes and Gilbert Roland...
...interesting sample of the latter is . . . and Tell of Time, a 712-page novel based on the post-Civil War background of Author Krey's Texas forbears (the family still owns a plantation in the cotton-growing Brazos Valley of southeastern Texas). Here the tedium of the narrative contrasts particularly with the dramatic events in which the family was involved. The Civil War itself was only slightly more violent than Reconstruction Texas, with its swarms of ruined Confederate soldiers turned loose, its bitter landowners turned Ku Kluxers to fight a black army of occupation...
...heir to a big Texas cotton plantation, goes home with a Georgia bride, immediately becomes a leading Ku Klux Klan guerrilla and politician in the sacred cause of States' Rights. The main story covers the years when Reconstruction violence is at its height. Author Krey's historical background (from the planters' viewpoint) is well informed. But Cavin's leading part is woodenly dramatized. Although he rides with the Klan, is away for weeks on secret political missions, the reader catches him only when he has returned to the plantation and talks with his wife and neighbors...