“He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard.”

Source: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 5 "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man", p. 141

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Mary McCarthy79

American writer 1912–1989

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