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Western Union Boy
"Western Union Boy" is a short story written by Nathanael West in the early 1930s; it was not published in West's lifetime and appears only in the Library of America edition of his collected work: ''Novels & Other Writings''. Plot summary The story deals with a certain type of people, not defined by occupation but by an added burden they carry: All Western Union boys do not deliver messages. Some of them are lawyers, writers and so forth. But all of them are busy doing something under their regular occupations, and it is this something that makes them "Western Union boys." What they are doing is failing, mechanically, yet desperately and seriously, they are failing. The mechanical part of it is very important. Other characteristics of this specific group of people include eagerness, a desire to please and an awareness of their own failure, which at times leads them to laugh at themselves. The central incident of this story concerns F. Winslow, a middle-aged "Western Union boy" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Story
A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, mythic tales, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century. Definition The short story is a crafted form in its own right. Short stories make use of plot, resonance, and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. The short story is sometimes referred to as a genre. Determining what exactly defines a short story has been recurrently problematic. A classic definition of a short ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Library Of America
The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published over 300 volumes by authors ranging from Mark Twain to Philip Roth, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, including selected writing of several U.S. presidents. Overview and history The ''Bibliothèque de la Pléiade'' ("La Pléiade") series published in France provided the model for the LOA, which was long a dream of critic and author Edmund Wilson. The initial organizers included American academic Daniel Aaron,Cromie, William J., Ken Gewertz, Corydon Ireland, and Alvin Powell"Honorary degrees awarded at Commencement's Morning Exercises", ''Harvard Gazette''. June 7, 2007. Lawrence Hughes, Helen Honig Meyer, and Roger W. Straus Jr. The initial board of advisers included Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, R. W. B. Lewis, Robert Coles, Irving Howe, and Eudora ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nathanael West
Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was an American writer and screenwriter. He is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: ''Miss Lonelyhearts'' (1933) and ''The Day of the Locust'' (1939), set respectively in the newspaper and Hollywood film industries. Early life Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Anuta (Anna, née Wallenstein, 1878–1935) and Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932), from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript. After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. Although West d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sacvan Bercovitch
Sacvan Bercovitch (October 4, 1933 – December 8, 2014) was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States. During an academic career spanning five decades, he was considered to be one of the most influential and controversial figures of his generation in the emerging field of American studies. Education and academic career Bercovitch was born in Montreal, Quebec, and his given name is a portmanteau of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Anarchists who had been executed six years earlier. He received his B.A. at Sir George Williams College, now Concordia University (1958) and his Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University (1965). (Since then he's received honorary degrees from both institutions: an LLD from Concordia in 1993 and an HLD from Claremont in 2005). Bercovitch taught at Brandeis, the University of California-San Diego, Princeton, and from 1970 to 1984 at Columbia. From 1984 until he retir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Union
The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company changed its name to the Western Union Telegraph Company in 1856 after merging with several other telegraph companies. The company dominated the American telegraphy industry from the 1860s to the 1980s, pioneering technology such as telex and developing a range of telegraph-related services (including wire money transfer) in addition to its core business of transmitting and delivering telegram messages. After experiencing financial difficulties, Western Union began to move its business away from communications in the 1980s and increasingly focused on its money transfer services. The company ceased its communications operations completely in 2006, at which time The New York Times described it as "the world's largest money-transfer business" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding team, called the pitcher, throws a ball that a player on the batting team, called the batter, tries to hit with a bat. The objective of the offensive team (batting team) is to hit the ball into the field of play, away from the other team's players, allowing its players to run the bases, having them advance counter-clockwise around four bases to score what are called " runs". The objective of the defensive team (referred to as the fielding team) is to prevent batters from becoming runners, and to prevent runners' advance around the bases. A run is scored when a runner legally advances around the bases in order and touches home plate (the place where the player started as a batter). The principal objective of the batting team is to hav ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phi Beta Kappa
The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences, and to induct the most outstanding students of arts and sciences at only select American colleges and universities. It was founded at the College of William and Mary on December 5, 1776, as the first collegiate Greek-letter fraternity and was among the earliest collegiate fraternal societies. Since its inception, 17 U.S. Presidents, 40 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, and 136 Nobel Laureates have been inducted members. Phi Beta Kappa () stands for ('), which means "Wisdom it. love of knowledgeis the guide it. helmsmanof life". Membership Phi Beta Kappa has chapters in only about 10% of American higher learning institutions, and only about 10% of these schools' Arts and Sciences graduates are invited to join the soc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Brown is one of nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Admissions at Brown is among the most selective in the United States. In 2022, the university reported a first year acceptance rate of 5%. It is a member of the Ivy League. Brown was the first college in the United States to codify in its charter that admission and instruction of students was to be equal regardless of their religious affiliation. The university is home to the oldest applied mathematics program in the United States, the oldest engineering program in the Ivy League, and the third-oldest medical program in New England. The university was one of the early doctoral-granting U.S. institutions in the late 19th century, adding masters ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pogrom
A pogrom () is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement). Similar attacks against Jews which also occurred at other times and places retrospectively became known as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres. Significant pogroms in the Russian Empire included the Odessa pogroms, Warsaw pogrom (1881), Kishinev pogrom (1903), Kiev pogrom (1905), and Białystok pogrom (1906). After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, several pogroms occurred amidst the power struggles in Eastern Europe, including the Lwów pogrom (1918) and Kiev Pogroms (1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Day Of The Locust
''The Day of the Locust'' is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West set in Hollywood, California. The novel follows a young artist from the Yale School of Fine Arts named Tod Hackett, who has been hired by a Hollywood studio to do scene design and painting. While he works he plans an important painting to be called "The Burning of Los Angeles," a portrayal of the chaotic and fiery holocaust which will destroy the city. While the cast of characters Tod befriends are a conglomerate of Hollywood stereotypes, his greater discovery is a part of society whose "eyes filled with hatred," and "had come to California to die." This undercurrent of society captures the despair of Americans who worked and saved their entire lives only to realize, too late, that the American dream was more elusive than they imagine. Their anger boils into rage, and the craze over the latest Hollywood premiere erupts violently into mob rule and absolute chaos. In the introduction to ''The Day of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Miss Lonelyhearts
''Miss Lonelyhearts'' is a novella by Nathanael West. He began writing it early in 1930 and completed the manuscript in November 1932. Published in 1933, it is an Expressionist black comedy set in New York City during the Great Depression. It is about a male newspaper advice columnist who provides advice to lonesome people who becomes so affected by their desperate letters that he spirals into depression, drinking, and ill-considered sexual affairs, which leads to his downfall. Plot summary In the story, Miss Lonelyhearts is the pseudonym for an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column for the lovelorn and lonesome, a duty that the other newspaper staff consider to be a joke. As Miss Lonelyhearts reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional bar fights. He is also the victim of the pranks and cynical advice of Shrike, his feature editor at the newspaper. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Cool Million
''A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin'' is Nathanael West's third novel, published in 1934. It is a brutal satire of Horatio Alger's novels and their eternal optimism. Plot summary ''A Cool Million'', as its subtitle suggests, presents “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,” piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaire’s '' Candide'', which satirized the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Pitkin is a typical ‘Schlemiel’, stumbling from one situation to the next; he gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited. In a parallel plot Betty Prail, Pitkin's love interest, is raped, abused, and sold into prostitution. Over the course of the novel Pitkin manages to lose an eye, his teeth, his thumb, his scalp and his leg, but nevertheless retains his optimism and gullibility to the inevitably bitter end. Pitkin's troubles, however, don't end with his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
