Twentieth Century
In the early twentieth century, the district became an active summer arts community. Home to writers and artists, it was noted for popular outdoor theatrical performances sponsored by the successful stage actor, Aldrich Bowker (1875–1947), one of its summer residents. Bowker succeeded Henry Travers in the role of Grandpa in George S. Kaufman's You Can't Take It With You on Broadway, and played it for over 500 consecutive performances in New York and Chicago. When Kaufman won the Pulitzer Prize for the play in 1937, Bowker was the presenter. He went on to play character roles in 25 motion pictures between 1939 and 1942, including The Major and the Minor and Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Aldrich Bowker's brother, Frank Bowker, also a district resident, was the author of Ashby Four Corners, a play about life in a small New England town whose setting is Russell Hill. Clara Burbank (1862–1927), a successful still life artist, was a neighbor in the district, as was Amy L. Burbank (1875–1948), a popular New England landscape painter.
Read more about this topic: Cambridge Grant Historic District
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley’s footsteps....To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means; to all eternity, falsehoods and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)