Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...that he more or less ignores the facts to get at the truth, and no set of facts could be more misleading than those surrounding his birth. It occurred on May 11, 1927 in Montreal, where his father kept a tobacco shop. Although that might suggest a solid burgher background, Canadian citizenship, and perhaps a hard fall on the ice, Mort had none of these. Harry Sahl, his father, had come out of an immigrant family on New York's Lower East Side with a strong will to be a playwright. Broadway and Hollywood gave him just enough encouragement...
...fictional conjecture about What Made Harry Run, against the background of New Deal politics, could have been a highly interesting book, but Author Weidman does not even try to write it. Freely and rather irresponsibly, he tacks together the familiar Hopkins characteristics-his social work beginnings, his poor health and cadaverous looks, his rise to Olympus as Roosevelt's closest adviser. But these traits clothe a synthetic creature wholly unlike Hopkins in his private involvements and far duller than Harry in his political intrigues. Much, of the book is taken up with Ivey's having a mysterious...
...flesh and blood, but mainly flesh, world of Soho provides a background of night life and street life, strippers and whores (it's pre-Wolfenden and Street Offenses Act). Harvey's treatment of his common-law wife, Sylvia Syms, an ecydysiast who wants to be a singer, heightens the immediacy of the theme of survival of the fittest...
When the countess posed for Goya the second time, she was only 21, and the artist never treated a subject with more tenderness. As usual, he did not care about background-the person was his concern-and he painted her sitting in darkness, yet glowing with light, her pale hands gracefully folded in a shy attempt to conceal her first pregnancy. But what makes the picture unforgettable is the expression on the face-the exquisitely sad look of one whose life has been stolen and who knows that no one will give it back...
George Apley may have been a snob-but he also had something for which his creator had undisguised admiration: "Essential and undeviating discipline of background." Wickford Point came even closer to home. It was the story of a popular writer, a Harvard graduate, reacting against the decadence and futile ancestor worship of his tumble-down New England family. And if the hero had the unmistakable air of the author himself-the pipe-smoking, tweedy, dressed-by-Brooks-Brothers blueblood-the hero's family was also unquestionably Marquand...