Word: hack
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...when Novelist Frederic Wakeman sent Adman Victor Norman into the high-salary altitudes of The Hucksters, he let his man enjoy the big, bad money for a while, then shot him down in a barrage of hack-ack. But the new heroes do not come to bad ends. They are drumbeatniks who brood during a few drinks about the morality of what they are doing, then get over it. Author Stephens' hero, for instance, guiltily grows an ulcer after he rings in an infected blood sample in the yearly Wassermann test the agency requires his boss to take...
There is, to begin with, the American ambassador to a Southeast Asian nation called Sarkhan. Louis ("Lucky Lou") Sears is a political hack who does not speak Sarkhanese ("Fifty percent of the entire Foreign Service officer corps do not have a speaking knowledge of any foreign language"). He loathes the people, the place, the climate. By contrast, the Soviet ambassador is a carefully trained career diplomat who reads and writes Sarkhanese, has studied Buddhism. To show his appreciation of the Sarkhanese ideal of slimness, he diets away 40 Ibs.; to indicate his enthusiasm for Sarkhanese music, he becomes "a fairly...
...Indiana for conspiracy to bribe a state highway official, Hutcheson and other Carpenter officials turned a fast 200% profit by buying right-of-way land for $40,000, selling it to the state a few weeks later for $120,000. Also, in memory of his father, Hutcheson paid a hack writer $310,000 from union funds to write an official biography of Big Bill...
Died. Eddie Davis, 53, New York cab driver turned hack writer (his own joke), gagman for Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante. Bob Hope, co-author of brassy Broadway musicals (Ankles Aweigh, Follow the Girls); of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Davis' career got up on two wheels when Eddie Cantor happened into his crouched-and-waiting cab in 1928. Davis worked some ten years for him, cracked: "Every year he raised my pay but no matter how much money he gave me I still wouldn't marry one of his daughters." Davis provided Jimmy Durante with...
Fifteen-year old Anthony ("writer, artist, translator, hack; gambler, sensualist, fool ... onlooker at his own ruin") spies Christine ("white tennis costume... dove gray fur jacket ... full of fun") in a tea-room, launching 18 years of unrequited love...