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

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

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 2020

More rabidly, it extended to the long-suffering indigenous population that predated the European arrivistes.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 9, 2019

By the early 20th century, Gilded Age arrivistes were decamping to Woodlawn in the Bronx, which had been built in 1863, 25 years after Green-Wood, making it in some sense seem passé.

From New York Times ● Oct. 30, 2015

Now, many of them are considered household names, even mandarins of a sort—Gabriel García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Julio Cortázar—but first they were gritty arrivistes, young and unknown.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 28, 2015

Masters of power politics, engineers of genius, the Mexica were also upstarts and pretenders, arrivistes who falsely claimed a brilliant line of descent.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann