Detail from a manuscript page by John Banville.

Best Author-on-Author Insults in History

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling: How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw: An idiot child screaming in a hospital.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen: Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner: Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
W. H. Auden on Robert Browning: I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.
Mark Twain on Jane Austen: Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

*This is one of the many required reads for this semester. These types of reviews will consist more of what we discussed in class than my thoughts on the work.

We read several of Emerson’s essays in class, but I most enjoyed “Self-Reliance”.  The essay has three major divisions: the importance of self-reliance, self-reliance and the individual, and self-reliance and society. As a whole, it promotes self-reliance as an ideal, even a virtue, and contrasts it with various modes of dependence or conformity. I suppose that’s why I enjoyed it. Emerson has always been one of my favorite writers, but I been able to read “Self-Reliance” before now.

Rating: ★★★★

thelifeguardlibrarian:

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s study.