“Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.”
William Faulkner II: Sartoris
“If the book had a plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions, but it is so diffuse that I don’t this would be of any use. My chief objection is that you don’t have any story to tell.”
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
“What is Babbitt’s profession? George F. Babbitt (1922), is a real estate dealer in Zenith, an average American city. He is married to Myra Babbitt; his children are named Verona and Ted.”
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
Virginia Woolf, Part I: To the Lighthouse
“Her work is poetry; it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are inherent in it.”
New York Evening Post
Virginia Woolf Part II: The Waves
“This chamber music, this closet fiction, is executed behind too firmly closed windows…the book is dull.”
H.C. Harwood, Saturday Review of Literature
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
What is novelist Ralph Ellison’s middle name? Waldo
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
Tagged black history, fiction/literature, united states history
“For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?”
Manchild in the Promised Land Foreword (1965)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Manchild in the Promised Land: (1965) An autobiographical novel by Claude Brown. Set in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, the novel is a coming-of-age story in which Sonny, the author, escapes the ghetto and the drugs, prostitution, and violence that plague it. Having sought refuge in higher education, the author conveys a sense of warmth toward the Harlem ghetto while simultaneously contributing to the spirited social criticism of the time.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Arna [Wendell] Bontemps: (1902-1973) American writer, librarian, and teacher. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, Bontemps moved to California at the age of three. After graduating from Pacific Union college in 1923, he moved to Harlem, where he emerged as an award-winning poet during the Harlem Renaissance. His best-known works, however, are his novels, particularly Black Thunder (1936), and historical novel about the abortive slave rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser in the Virginia of 1800. Bontemps’s most enduring legacy was his work as a librarian and historian of African-American culture. During his twenty-two year career as Librarian at Fisk University, he created one of the principal archival sources for study in the field. Among Bontemps’s thirty works are two additional novels, God Sends Sunday (1931) and Drums at Dusk (1939); a major anthology of folklore coedited with Langston Hughes, The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). A collection of memoirs, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays (1972); and several histories and fictional accounts of black life written for a juvenile audience. He collaborated with Countee Cullen to transform God Sends Sunday into a successful Broadway musical, St. Louis Woman (1945).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Harlem Renaissance: With the largest concentration of African-American, West Indian, and African populations in the U.S., Harlem had become the ‘Negro Capital’ (as it was then called) of America by the early 20th century. After World War I, the flourishing intellectual, artistic, musical and political scene focused on historical recollection and redefinition of the African-American experience. Among the best-known artists are Aaron Douglas, William Johnson, and Jacob Lawrence.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“It seems to be the great gift of Mr. Wolfe that everything is interesting, valuable, and significant to him. It must be confessed that he has just missed the greatest of gifts, that of being able to convey his interest to the ordinary reader.”
Basil Davenport, Saturday Review of Literature
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Kismet: A musical play (1953) based on a play (1911) by Edward Knoblock about a poet turned beggar who has a series of adventures reminiscent of The Arabian Knights. The music of Alexander Borodin was arranged by Robert Wright and George Forrest. The title comes from the Turkish qismet (‘portion’ or ‘lot’) and is now commonly understood to mean ‘fate.’ Kismet is sometimes advanced as a more becoming alternative to ‘Kiss me” in Horatio Nelson’s putative last words, ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, fiction/literature, music, readings/research
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.