Category Archives: Reference

“A book seemingly intended to sap the foundation of that morality which it is the duty of parents and all public instructors to inculcate in the minds of young people.”

Sir John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson 1787

“I scarcely know a more corrupt work.”

Samuel Johnson, quoted in Memoirs, Hannah More 1780

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“From the first pages of this novel to the last we are conscious that the author is straining for strangeness. He will say nothing simply. His paragraphs are so long and so involved that it is hard to remember who is talking or the subject which began the paragraph… We doubt the story just as we doubt the conclusion… We do not doubt the existence of decadence, but we do doubt that it is the most important or the most interesting feature in American life, or even Mississippi life.”

Boston Evening Transcript

“The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.”

Clifton Fadiman

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“…the critic can hardly be blamed if some categorical imperative which persists in the human condition (even at this late date) compels him to put his book in a high place in an inferior category.”

New York Times Book Review

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

“Any second rate English society novelist could have written this story better than F. Scott Fitzgerald though no one could have touched his best chapters. Is it laziness, indifference, a lack of standards, or imperfect education that results in this constant botching of the first rate by American novelists?”

Saturday Review of Literature

“…none of the characters in this book is made sufficiently measurable at the beginning to give to his later downhill course anything more than mildly pathetic interest.

William Troy, The Nation

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.