Of course Dahl was the son of immigrants, and so not to be trusted...

[steepholm]

Sometimes, life copies art...



Perhaps they'll set The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists instead?

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I actually wouldn't mind if they changed the text - it's been on the syllabus for a long, long time - but not because of its nationality!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I really don't see anything wrong with a British educational system preferring British works, all other things being equal. American systems certainly prefer American works, and one remembers the classic moment in the 1950s when the House Un-American Activities Committee made the inarguable declaration that Christopher Marlowe was un-American.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's hilarious! One can't deny that he was indeed un-American, I suppose. That's not a model I'd especially like to emulate, though.

[mount-oregano.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare, Dickens, Bobby Burns, Keats and Yeats, Shelley (both of them), James Joyce, George Orwell ... that was part of my American misspent high school years.

Oh, and Tolkien, but we read him voluntarily.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And how many American writers were there?

[mount-oregano.livejournal.com]

Poe, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Shirley Jackson (The Lottery), Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, O. Henry, Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hallow), and Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451).

And outside of English-language originals, that is "world literature," there was (in translation) Cervantes, Homer, Kafka, and Marx -- yes, I read Karl Marx in literature class as an example of Romantic-era non-fiction. It was hard to take Communism seriously after that.

And, voluntarily, Phillip K. Dick, Henry David Thoreau, and Anne Frank.

What strikes me most is how much time I must have had to read back then.