“What was Maurice Sendak’s first book? The author/illustrator was a designer of window displays in a toy store when he was commissioned to illustrate The Wonderful Farm by Marcel Ayme in 1951. Sendak wrote and illustrated his first children’s book, Kenny’s Window, in 1956.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
If you seek to interest students in J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Hobbits might be a good place to start. It’s a short exercise–a half-page–with only three questions. I’ve used this to good effect with alienated students who I know had an interest in mythology, and fantasy literature.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“What was the name of Holden Caulfield’s roommate in The Catcher in the Rye (1951)? Stradlater was the rich and conceited roommate.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“It’s hard to believe that a lady from Kansas City with a house in the best residential section, one full-time maid, one mink coat and a Lincoln for her very own, should finish up as timorous and ephemeral as a lunar moth on the outside of a window.”
Florence Crowther, New York Times Book Review
“It is hard to imagine a creep like Bridge ever lived. If he did, so what? Connell fails to show that he has any relevance to what’s happening in America, 1969.”
Cleveland Press
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
It’s hard to imagine, especially for younger people (I’m old enough to remember Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”), that the United States once was a country that cared about the fate of its poorest citizens and sought to create something substantial and powerful enough to help them transcend their circumstances.
This reading on Upton Sinclair and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet will go some distance toward helping students understand the nature and value of civic engagement to aid the most vulnerable citizens of our nation. If you’re interested in going further than this worksheet in an inquiry into Mr. Sinclair’s biography and activism, the fifth and final paragraph of the short reading in this post notes his near victory in the 1934 gubernatorial race in California. What it doesn’t mention is that Upton Sinclair’s candidacy in that race was part of his “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) campaign, which was an amplification of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. There is a lot to understand here–particularly why such movement continue to fail when there are so many more poor people than rich in this nation.
Now go vote!
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
[I confess that in more than thirty years of trying to appreciate his work, the appeal of Raymond Carver is completely lost on me.]
“There is nothing here to appease a reader’s basic literary needs.”
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
If you’re teaching Hemingway’s fiction, this reading on Ernest Hemingway and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet might serve as an introduction to the author himself. I wrote it for that purpose, to support students who were about to start with The Old Man and the Sea–a novella which, despite its plaintive prose, can baffle struggling and emergent readers.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Better than anyone else, Benchley recognized his own irresponsibility in matters of finance. He once applied for a loan at his local bank and, to his shock, was granted the money with no questions asked. The next day he reportedly withdrew all his savings from the bank, explaining, ‘I don’t trust a bank that would lend money to such a poor risk.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Art for Art’s Sake: English equivalent of the French l’art pour l’art, which is embodied in The Poetic Principle by Edgar Allan Poe:
There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified…than the poem which is a poem and nothing more—the poem written solely for the poem’s sake.
The doctrine which this represents, that the aim of art should be creation and the perfection of technical expression rather than the service of a moral, political, or didactic end, has been evolving ever since the romantic period. It was adumbrated by Coleridge and given early expression by Poe in the above treatise, flowered among the French symbolist poets and their English associate Walter Pater, and reached its culmination in the aesthetic theory of I.A. Richards. It was the dominant theory of art and especially of poetry until the 1930s, when the proletarian and Marxist movements in literature threatened for a time to revive the 18th-century didactic theories. After the beginning of World War II in 1939, the latter movements began to lose much of their influence.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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