Word: heroic
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...second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 a few miles from the Hollywood editing table where Orson Welles was giving birth to his own screen legend with Citizen Kane. The sin of Welles' life was that it had two complementary, all-American acts: heroic tragedy, then celebrity farce. By the time he was 25, Welles had traveled the world, appeared at the Gate Theater in Dublin, stormed Broadway with crackling, sepulchral productions of Shakespeare and The Cradle Will Rock, scared America out of its wits with his War of the Worlds radio caprice...
...burned down in 1764, the University commissioned a new building from architect Sir Francis Bernard, who was also the Royal Governor. Dawes again built the building which was used as a chapel, lecture hall, dining hall, and library. According to the an architectural history of Cambridge, "The college obtained heroic Copley portraits to decorate the dining hall, making it the only American interior of the time where paintings, frames, and architecture were planned to form a single decorative scheme.... All in all the most sophisticated American college building before Bulfinch...
There came to him an image of man's whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man's life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man's grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew that his life would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last...
...Latin mania a potu, meaning craziness from drink, with the r tossed in from the habitual inflection of the region. "The detective work involved is exciting--to weird people," says Hartman. The white-haired Cassidy, already hard at the second volume and, despite his years, determined to see the heroic work through to the end, puts himself among the nuts. "I'm mad about words," he says, pleased as a basketful of possum-heads (1906, northwest Arkansas . . . Rare...
...then, at the last, in greatest torment, he launched himself into eternity by producing a work of enduring literature, a parting labor of memory and language from the man of pure action. Mount McGregor was a kind of archetype of American retrospection: recollection performed as heroic deed. Improbably, Grant became the greatest of the rememberers of a war so morally and dramatically fascinating that Americans have returned to it ever since, generation after generation, as if to a text of inexhaustible meaning...