Best Man, The
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre
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2004
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© The Oxford Companion to American Theatre 2004, originally published by Oxford University Press 2004. (Hide copyright information)
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Best Man, The (1960), a play by Gore
Vidal. [
Morosco Theatre, 520 perf.] The leading contenders in a battle for the presidential nomination are William Russell ( Melvyn
Douglas), a gentlemanly liberal of the old school, and Joseph Cantwell ( Frank Lovejoy), a calculating, unscrupulous senator. Cantwell obtains a damaging psychiatric analysis once made of Russell and releases it to the press. A feisty ex‐president, Arthur Hockstadter ( Lee
Tracy), tells Cantwell, “It's not that I mind your being a bastard. . . . It's your being such a stupid bastard, I object to.” Hockstadter leaves the Cantwell camp and joins Russell, whom he urges to make public Cantwell's history of homosexuality. Russell refuses, withdraws from the race, and throws his support to a third candidate. A wittily written, shrewdly observed comedy produced by the
Playwrights' Company, it was peopled with figures playgoers recognized as thinly disguised modern political celebrities: Russell was not unlike Adlai Stevenson; Cantwell, Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Hockstadter, Harry Truman. A Broadway revival in 2000 was well received.
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Chains and links.(Opinion)
Magazine article from: KMWorld; 6/1/2004; ; 700+ words
; Over 60 years ago, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, a professor at Johns Hopkins, gave a series of lectures that resulted in his classic work, The Great Chain of Being. Its central...
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Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
Encyclopedia entry from: Encyclopedia of World Biography
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (1873-1962), American philosopher, helped establish the history of ideas as a separate scholarly field. Born in Berlin, Germany, on Oct. 10, 1873, Arthur Lovejoy emigrated to the United States...
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Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken
Dictionary entry from: Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken ( b Berlin, Germany, 10 October...epistemology, history of ideas . Lovejoy was the son of an American father, the Reverend W. W. Lovejoy, and a German mother, Sara Oncken. He was educated at the University...
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