Word: realism
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...long after the Civil War, two intolerable improprieties came to the notice of U.S. Victorians. One was a minor mountain in north-central Vermont, which a less delicate age had named Camel's Rump. The other was a literary movement, which called itself realism, whose adherents proclaimed their intent to describe the world as it really was. The prudes dealt easily enough with the mountain; it became, and still remains. Camel's Hump. They had more trouble with the literary movement. For decades it was a standoff; realism did not disappear, but neither were the early realists (themselves...
...second, Henry James, very nearly succeeded in turning the strictures into virtues. The third, and least, in some ways makes the most interesting case study. It was William Dean Howells. not Twain or James, who presided over American literature for 50 years, who fought the critical battles for realism, and who, as the country's first avowed realist, was righteously damned as a vulgarian and a sensationalist...
...friends such as Twain and detractors such as H. L. Mencken admitted to be superb; and they were written about subjects that mattered-the hardening caste strata in U.S. society, the pain of divorce, the wrongs of a laissez-faire economy. Yet before his death in 1920, with the realism he had preached unshakably in vogue, he wrote to his friend Henry James, "I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight." Dead he was, and despite a recent and wholly campus-bound revival, he is likely...
...form of white tie, tails, ballroom scenes and pretty dolls will show up on a Garry Moore show or a Perry Como episode, but, by and large, whether it's new public affairs or the run-of-the-mill Hollywood vidfilm product that's hellbent for realism, TV today, for the man in work clothes and business suit, is simply an extension of what he sees, hears and participates in all day long...
...know just how old Bob is," said the sprightly redhead, "but he's closer to medicare than most Republicans." Added Lucy, recalling Hope's salad days: "He was handsome then-big chest, hard stomach. Of course, that's all behind him now." . . . Stage realism is all very well, but Actor Hugh Griffith, 50, a 1960 Oscar winner for his comic role as the chariot-racing Sheik Ilderim in Ben-Hur, laid it on a mite thick. Standing atop a wooden box in London's Aldwych Theater for a mock hanging scene in Bertolt Brecht...