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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
When a novel gets published, expect some bruised egos
It certainly isn’t uncommon for a novelist to pattern his fictional characters after people in real life, often from among his or her very own acquaintances. Not surprisingly, the publication of a novel is very likely followed by bruised egos and frayed friendships. It may even give rise to bitter recriminations and lawsuits, or—even worse—to threats of physical harm or even death to the offending author.
In “The Deadliest Book Review,” an essay he wrote for the January 14, 2011 The New
York Times Sunday Book Review, Peter Duffy recalls what is perhaps the most spectacular crime in American literary history: David Graham Phillips, author of the novel The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig, was gunned down 100 years ago by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, who believed that Philips had libeled the Goldsborough family in the novel. At the time, Phillips had just been christened by the flamboyant journalist H. L. Mencken as “the leading American novelist,” the star of the first decade of the 20th century. His assailant, on the other hand, hailed from the gilded aristocracy that Phillips had regarded as so destructive to America.
But had Phillips really libeled the Goldsboroughs? According to Duffy’s account of the murder, Phillips’s friends and family insisted that he had never heard of the Goldsboroughs, and that Phillips himself—“as if speaking for every novelist who has ever been accused of callous indifference to the reputations of real people”—said as he lay dying that he actually didn’t know the man who had gunned him down.
Read Peter Duffy’s “The Deadliest Book Review” in The New York Times Sunday Book Review now!
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In “The Trouble With Autobiography,” an essay he wrote for the January 2011 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, bestselling novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux examines other authors’ autobiographies to justify why he won’t attempt to write his own autobiography. Instead, he says, he might write an autobiographical novel. He explains: “I think I would find it impossible to write an autobiography without invoking the traits I seem to deplore in the ones I’ve described—exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction. Therefore, I suppose my Copperfield beckons.”
Read Paul Theroux’s “The Trouble With Autobiography” in the Smithsonian Magazine now!
