Tag Archives: literary oddities

The Algonquin Wits: Heywood Broun on Open-Mindedness

Posted on November 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

[Said of one fence-straddling radio commentator]

“His mind is so open that the wind whistles through it.”

Heywood Broun

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

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Rotten Reviews: Sinclair Lewis and Main Street

Posted on November 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

“It is full of fact colored by rather laborious and over clever satire. But it has no sustained action, whether as realism or as satire. It is a bulky collection of scenes, types, caricatures, humorous episodes, and facetious turns of phrase; a mine of comedy from which the ore has not been lifted.”

The Weekly Review

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

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Rotten Rejections: Isabel of Bavaria

Posted on November 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

[The squib refers to the novel by Alexandre Dumas.]

“Stick to drama, my dear fellow. You know you are a dramatic through and through.”

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

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Book Learning

Posted on November 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Book-learning, n. The dunce’s derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impenitent ignorance.”

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

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The Algonquin Wits: Ring Lardner on the Vox Populi

Posted on November 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Public opinion in this country runs like a shower bath. We have no temperatures between hot and cold.”

Ring Lardner

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

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Rotten Reviews: Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Posted on November 14, 2018 | Leave a comment

“D.H. Lawrence has a diseased mind. He is obsessed by sex…we have no doubt that he will be ostracized by all except the most degenerate coteries in the literary world.”

John Bull

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

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William Randolph Hearst, Possibly Apocryphally, on War

Posted on November 12, 2018 | Leave a comment

“[Telegram sent to Frederic Remington. whom Hearst had sent to Cuba to cover a rebellion there;] You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

William Randolph Hearst, U.S. Publisher, 1863-1951

Attributed in James Creelman, On the Great Highway (1901). Howard Langer, America in Quotations, notes: “Some scholars now question Creelman’s reliability, pointing out that neither Remington nor Davis [a correspondent accompanying Remington to Cuba] ever confirmed it and that Hearst flatly denied it.”

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Rotten Reviews: Under the Volcano

Posted on November 10, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Mr. Lowry is passionately in earnest about what he has to say concerning human hope and defeat, but for all his earnestness he has succeeded only in writing a rather good imitation of an important novel.”

The New Yorker

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

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The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

Posted on November 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

“A dark novel (1939) by the US writer Nathanael West (1903-1940). The work explores the seamy underside of Hollywood (where West himself had worked as a scriptwriter), and shows how it eats away at people’s better selves. At the end Homer, a harmless but unexciting accountant, knocks down a boy who attacks him, and is in turn overwhelmed by a group of people (like a swarm of locusts) who are waiting for the arrival of stars at a a premiere.

‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.’

Joel 2:25

John Schlesinger’s 1975 film of West’s book, with Donald Sutherland and Karen Black, was highly regarded.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

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Rotten Reviews: George Bernard Shaw Pans Othello

Posted on October 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Pure melodrama. There is not a touch of characterization that goes below the skin.”

George Bernard Shaw, Saturday Review 1897 

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

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