Unheralded

CLAY JENKINSON: The Future In Context — ‘Sivilizing’ Mark Twain: One Scholar’s Effort To Make Huck Finn Safe For School Again

“All modern American literature,” Ernest Hemingway once proclaimed, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’” Despite such accolades, this masterwork from Twain — the pen name used by Samuel Clemens — has been slowly disappearing from American classrooms, a development primarily driven by the novel’s repeated use — 219 times in all — of that uniquely offensive term that …


Unheralded

LILLIAN CROOK: WildDakotaWoman — Willa Cather’s Red Cloud

Although it is now more than 30 years ago, I remember very clearly the day when I was a graduate student at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University and Dr. Michael Rothacker gave his students the assignment of reading a novel of our choosing and writing a report on said novel. My friend, Pamela Jean, and I went right over to …


DAVE VORLAND: It Occurs To Me — Bois du Boulogne

I shot this photo in Monday of a professional dog walker in the Bois du Boulogne, the large park on the edge of Paris, which figures in Marcel Proust’s novel, “A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu.” Over my lifetime, I’ve read this work more than once in English translation (all 3,031 pages in seven volumes), and some of it in …

TERRY DULLUM — The Dullum File: ‘Go Set A Watchman’

Like a couple of million other people who have preordered the “new” Harper Lee novel “Go Set A Watchman,” I’ve been eagerly awaiting the book’s publication date next week. A couple of million is no exaggeration, by the way. It is the biggest preorder ever for HarperCollins. It’s being hyped as the biggest publishing event in several years. “Go Set a …