arriviste

Mr. McInerney had his turn as a celebrated literary arriviste.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 17, 2026

Her circle includes an aunt who is a champion wrestler, a resident Goth named Isabel and sultry Penny Century, an arriviste married to a wealthy magnate with horns on his head.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 3, 2023

Similarly, in Our Mutual Friend there’s lacerating satire of the nouveau-riche Veneerings and their aristocratic and arriviste hangers-on.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 23, 2020

The main thing Undine has going for her is that she’s gorgeous—her looks “as vivid, and almost as crude” as the electric lights that blaze in her arriviste hotel room.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 9, 2019

Bobby, in contrast, was nervous and volatile, the chess arriviste of Brooklyn, a colt of a player, and as it was beginning to develop, the spearhead of the coming generation of American players.

From "Endgame" by Frank Brady

Neither are they pure expressions of self-made grandeur in the style of today’s proud arrivistes who flag their wealth on social media as a capitalist boast.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 11, 2023

George and Ruth are the sophisticated, wealthy ones; Clay and Amanda are the middle-class arrivistes.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 2020

The article, which describes old-fashioned Wasps feuding with glamorous arrivistes, is a safari of rich people behaving badly.

From The New Yorker ● Jul. 16, 2019

Over the years, charming upstarts, curious arrivistes, and dogged usurpers joined the original collegiate cocktails, which themselves evolved and degenerated to varying degrees.

From Slate ● Sep. 16, 2013

They resemble the arrivistes of the Gilded Age, which began in the 1880s when industrial capitalists amassed staggering fortunes, except that there are so many of them and they seem to be relatively anonymous.

From "Class Matters" by The New York Times