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

Maréchal thrived in this milieu; unlike her grandfather, who came from a small fishing village, she was not an arriviste but the scion of an entrenched dynasty.

From New York Times ● Mar. 31, 2022

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

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

Her extravagant new home was designed to emulate grand European houses, as were the mansions built by real-life New York arrivistes of the era.

From New York Times ● Feb. 21, 2022

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

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

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