Stories of Ourselves: "My Greatest Ambition" by Morris Lurie

A thirteen-year-old boy dreams of being a comic-strip artist, but after he sells his first comic to a magazine, he discovers that publication does not necessarily lead to success.

Here are links to our lists for the short stories in Stories of Ourselves:
The Hollow of the Three Hills, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Signalman, The Happy Prince, The Yellow Wall Paper, The Son’s Veto, The Open Boat, The Moving Finger, The Door in the Wall, Sredni Vashtar, How It Happened, Her First Ball, The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection, The Fly in the Ointment, The Custody of the Pumpkin, An Englishman’s Home, The Phoenix, There Will Come Soft Rains, The Prison, The Destructors, Meteor, Billenium, The Lemon Orchard, The People Before, The Enemy, Five-Twenty, A Horse and Two Goats, Report on the Threatened City, The Rain Horse, Ming’s Biggest Prey, The Village Saint, Secrets, The Stoat, Games at Twilight, The Taste of Watermelon, Journey (Patricia Grace), The Bath, My Greatest Ambition, To Da-duh, in Memoriam, Of White Hairs and Cricket, Elephant, Sandpiper, Journey (Shirley Geok-Lin Um), The Third and Final Continent, Tyres, At Hiruharama, Real Time, On Her Knees, The Contest
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. tycoon
    a very wealthy or powerful businessperson
    There they sat, the astronomer, the nuclear physicist, the business tycoon (on the Stock Exchange), two mathematicians, three farmers, countless chemists, a handful of doctors, all aged thirteen and all with their heads in the clouds.
  2. idle
    silly or trivial
    Dreamers! Idle speculators! A generation of hopeless romantics!
  3. speculator
    someone who makes conjectures without knowing the facts
    Dreamers! Idle speculators! A generation of hopeless romantics!
  4. ambulate
    walk about or move from one place to another
    I remember writing ‘ambulate’ and saying it was a special way of walking.
  5. digress
    turn aside from the main subject of attention
    Do I digress?
  6. prospect
    belief about the future
    Did I want my comic to appear in a magazine which printed stories, where it would be read by the sort of people who were always taking books out of the library and sitting under trees and wearing glasses and squinting and turning pages with licked fingers? An awful prospect!
  7. scoff
    treat with contemptuous disregard
    Now let me properly introduce my father, a great scoffer.
  8. ludicrous
    inviting ridicule
    And my Good Suit was a year old and too short in the leg. I tried it on in front of the mirror, just to make sure, and I was right. It was ludicrous.
  9. lapel
    a fold of fabric below the collar of a coat or jacket
    There was enough material in the lapels alone to make three suits and have enough left over for a couple of caps.
  10. ruthless
    without mercy or pity
    Also, I would wear my eye-dazzling pure silk corn yellow tie, which, with the proper Windsor knot, would so ruthlessly rivet attention that no one would even look to see if I was wearing shoes.
  11. rivet
    hold someone's attention
    Also, I would wear my eye-dazzling pure silk corn yellow tie, which, with the proper Windsor knot, would so ruthlessly rivet attention that no one would even look to see if I was wearing shoes.
  12. momentous
    of very great significance
    Now, as the day of my appointment drew nearer and nearer, a great question had to be answered, a momentous decision made.
  13. imposing
    impressive in appearance
    They were part of an enormous building that looked like a factory, and were not at all imposing or impressive, as I had imagined them to be.
  14. exotic
    characteristic of another place or part of the world
    No neon, no massive areas of plate glass, no exotic plants growing in white gravel.
  15. foyer
    a large entrance or reception room or area
    I pushed open an ordinary door and stepped into an ordinary foyer and told an ordinary lady sitting at an ordinary desk who I was.
  16. poise
    great coolness and composure under strain
    She seemed, for some reason, quite surprised when she saw me sitting there, as though I had three eyes or was wearing a red suit, but I must say this for her, she had poise, she pulled herself together very quickly, hardly dropped a stitch, as it were, and holding open the door through which she had come, she said, ‘Won’t you come this way?’ and I did.
  17. overpower
    affect strongly or intensely, as with emotions
    Actually, there were only three of them, but they all stood up when I came in, and the effect was overpowering.
  18. usage
    the customary manner in which language is spoken or written
    ‘Well, yes, there are, ah, certain things,’ he said, turning over the pages of my comic, ‘not, ah, big mistakes, but, here, see? You’ve spelt it as “jungel” which is not, ah, common usage.’
  19. plague
    cause to suffer a blight
    Then we fell into another of these silences with which this appointment seemed to be plagued.
  20. fictitious
    formed or conceived by the imagination
    Now, Ned Kelly is all right, but what I like about comics is that they create a world of their own, like, say, Dick Tracy, a totally fictitious environment, which any clear thinking person knows doesn’t really exist, and Ned Kelly, well, that was real, it really happened.
Created on Mon Mar 12 10:41:41 EDT 2018 (updated Fri Mar 23 15:41:15 EDT 2018)

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