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

Zeynep Bozbay is warm and convincing as Marianne Effinger, who rejects her arriviste family’s lavish lifestyle by devoting herself to charity.

From New York Times ● Dec. 8, 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

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

Still, they had not ignored the risk that they could potentially be seen as arrivistes in their new home.

From New York Times ● Jul. 1, 2017

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