Tag Archives: literary oddities

Rotten Reviews: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

“Somewhere, Mr. Warren loses his grip on his backwoods opportunities and becomes so absorbed in a number of other characters that what might have been a useful study of an irresponsible politician whose prototype whe have had melancholy occasion to observe in the flesh turns out to be a disappointment.”

The New Yorker

“The language of both men and women is coarse, blasphemous, and revolting—their actions would shame a pagan hottentot.”

Catholic World

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

The Devil’s Dictionary: Apologize

“Apologize, vi. To lay the foundation for a future offense.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

The Algonquin Wits: Alexander Woollcott to Eleanor Roosevelt

“Woollcott enjoyed a close relationship with Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and occasionally visited them at the White House. In a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt, the purpose of which was to solicit the First Lady’s hospitality for an approaching vacation, he wrote: ‘I would like to come for a week or so. If you haven’t room for me, there are plenty of other places for me to go. I prefer yours.’”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

Book of Answers: The Death of Edgar Allan Poe

How did Edgar Allan Poe die? In October, 1849, the forty-year-old writer was found lying unconscious near a polling place in Baltimore. According to some reports, he had been fed liquor and dragged to various polling places to vote repeatedly. He was taken to a hospital where he remained semi-comatose for three days. On October 7, at 3 A.M. he died of “congestion of the brain” and possibly intestinal inflammation, a weak heart, and diabetes.

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Rotten Rejections: A Confederacy of Dunces

“A southern writer named John Kennedy Toole wrote a comic novel about life in New Orleans called A Confederacy of Dunces. It was so relentlessly rejected by publishers that he killed himself. That was in 1969. His mother refused to give up on the book. She sent it out and got it back, rejected, over and over again. At last she won the patronage of Walker Percy, who got it accepted by the Louisiana State University Press, and in 1980 it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.”

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

Richard Lederer’s Famous History of the World in Student Bloopers

House cleaning continues at Mark’s Text Terminal. Over 12 years of storing material inevitable redundancies occur, as do good intentions never realized–i.e. material planned, even begun, but never executed. For the next week or so, I’ll post materials that might be useful to you, readers and colleagues. In so doing, I’ll drive to separate the precious metals from the dross and the wheat from the chaff–and try not to waste your time with dross and chaff (shall I continue to beat these overworked metaphors?).

Somewhere along the line, most college students, I hope, encounter Richard Lederer’s famous (or infamous, I suppose, depending on one’s sense of humor) “The World According to Student Bloopers.” If you can use it, here is a typescript of that hilarious compendium.

Should you find typos in this document, they can be easily corrected by consulting Professor Lederer’s original under the middle of the three hyperlinks (“The World…”) above.

George Bernard Shaw on Bourgeois Morality

“Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak of expensive vices.”

George Bernard Shaw

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Oddball Place Names

This list of oddball place names never failed to bring laughter to my classroom when I taught an advisory at a middle school in the North Bronx.

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.

A Trio of Rotten Reviews: George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw I, Arms and the Man

Shaw may one day write a serious and even an artistic play, if he will only repress his irreverent whimsicality, try to clothe his character conceptions in flesh and blood, and realize the difference between knowingness and knowledge.”

William Archer, World

George Bernard Shaw II, Major Barbara

“There are no human beings in Major Barbara: only animated points of view.

William Archer, World

George Bernard Shaw III, Man and Superman

“I think Shaw, on the whole, is more bounder than genius…I couldn’t get on with Man and Superman: it disgusted me.”

Bertrand Russell, letter to G.L. Dickinson

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

The Devil’s Dictionary: Benevolence

“Benevolence, n. Subscribing five dollars towards the relief of one’s aged grandfather in the alms house, and publishing it in the newspaper.” 

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.