"Literature"" speech given over a century ago in 1900, Mark Twain said, (referring to a learned academic's lofty opinion of Milton's ""Paradise Lost"") that the work met the Professor's definition of a classic as ""something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read"". Classics are often defined in terms of their lasting freshness. Clifton Fadiman thought that the works that become classic books have their start in childhood, saying that ""If you wish to live long in the memory of men, you should not write for them at all. You should write what their children will enjoy."""
"as the classic of all literature and the alternate meaning of classic as ""a standard author"". Literary figures from different eras have also weighed in (sometimes humorously) on the matter. Alan Bennett, the modern English playwright and author, said that ""Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have read themselves."" Mark Van Doren, the Columbia University professor and poet, is quoted by Jim Trelease (in his library-monograph ""Classic Picture Books All Children Should Experience""), as saying that ""A classic is any book that stays in print"". And in his ""Disappearance of"
"as a collection (such as Great Books of the Western World, Modern Library, or Penguin Classics), presented as a list with an academic’s imprimatur (such as Harold Bloom's) or be the official reading list of an institution of higher learning (such as ""The Reading List"" at St. John's College or Rutgers University. In the 1980s, Italo Calvino said in his essay ""Why Read the Classics?"" that ""a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say"" and comes to the crux of personal choice in this matter when he says (italics in the original translation):"
"students to read. He would read something else, ""I did not like to play follow-the-leader in education. If everyone was forced to read ""The Merchant of Venice"", I would read ""Twelfth Night"". Those professors were wrong when quoting facts and, besides that, I had read most of the books at the Columbia University Library before I entered Columbia."" Kane once told a reporter for The Associated Press, ""I'm stupid enough not to believe anything until I see the proof."" Kane interviewing for an article for ""Liberty"" (December 1938) told the interviewer that, ""Nobody knew who did it first. The credit"
"Cox echoes Twain's ""classic"" sentiments of 1900 and Bennett's witticism about classic books when he opined on the Guardian.Co ""Books Blog"" that there are actually two kinds of ""classic novels"": The first are those we know we should have read, but probably have not. These are generally the books that make us burn with shame when they come up in conversation... The second kind, meanwhile, are those books that we've read five times, can quote from on any occasion, and annoyingly push on to other people with the words: ""You have to read this. It's a classic."" In 1850, Charles"
"article chronicles the fact that all but one of the publishers and agents failed to recognise her works, including Penguin Books and J. K. Rowling's publisher Bloomsbury, with the vast majority rejecting out of hand this apparent attempt by one of the world’s greatest known authors to gain a publishing deal. This despite the fact that one of the most famous opening lines in English literature, ""Pride and Prejudice""’s ""It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"" was left intact. On its publication the article"
"studies. Some write intellectual history; others bring the results and methods of social history to bear on reading literature. The value of extensive literary analysis has been questioned by several prominent artists. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that good readers do not read books, and particularly those which are considered to be literary masterpieces, ""for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations"". At a 1986 Copenhagen conference of James Joyce scholars, Stephen J. Joyce (the modernist writer's grandson) said, ""If my grandfather was here, he would have died laughing ... ""Dubliners"" and ""A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"""
"Harvard Classics The Harvard Universal Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, is a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature, compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot and first published in 1909. Eliot had stated in speeches that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. (Originally he had said a three-foot shelf.) The publisher P. F. Collier and Son saw an opportunity and challenged Eliot to make good on this statement by"
"elite. King himself later stated: [Harold] Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess. He might be able to say that Mark Twain is a great writer, but it's impossible for him to say that there's a direct line of descent from, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Jim Thompson because he doesn't read guys like Thompson. He just thinks, ""I never read him, but I know he's terrible."" In Roger Ebert's review of the 2004 movie ""Secret Window"", he stated,"
"letting that book get by. There were so many different editions, all sizes and kinds, some illustrated and some plain, that we figured the book must be all right. Then one of us happened to read it. It's a filthy book"". ""Candide"" is the most widely read of Voltaire's many works, and it is considered one of the great achievements of Western literature. However, ""Candide"" is not necessarily considered a true ""classic"". According to Bottiglia, ""The physical size of ""Candide"", as well as Voltaire's attitude toward his fiction, precludes the achievement of artistic dimension through plenitude, autonomous '3D' vitality, emotional"
"for example, claimed that Thackeray's readers ""ask him for something from his pen; what it is they do not care; and as he really has no other method of easily satisfying them, he gives them reminiscences of his old novels in profusion."" Walter Bagehot, in ""The Spectator"", said, ""As far as 'plot' is concerned, ""Philip"" is a failure. No one of all its most numerous readers has probably read it with eager interest as a story."" Nevertheless, Thackeray's fans must have found something to enjoy, since the book was reprinted frequently up the First World War. It fell into general"
"opinion, there was only one author who was 'classic': ""No modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense I have called Virgil a classic. Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil."" In this instance, though, Eliot said that the word had different meanings in different surroundings and that his concern was with ""one meaning in one context"". He states his focus is to define only ""one kind of art"" and that it does not have to be ""better...than another kind"". His opening paragraph makes a clear distinction between his particular meaning of classic having Virgil"
"activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. I realize, however, that I have an overpoweringly strong bias against it, for, if it is true, philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle tea-table amusement.Ernest Gellner wrote the book ""Words and Things"", in which he was fiercely critical of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Antony Flew, P. F. Strawson and many others. Ryle refused to have the book reviewed in the philosophical journal ""Mind"" (which he edited), and"
"the reader and objective result to memorize, a systematic scheme for arrangement in paragraphs, all of which is relevant only to objective science, but irrelevant to existential thought. From Socrates he has learned to confront the reader with a question, to picture the ideal as a possibility. From Socrates he has learned to keep the reader at a distance, to throw him back on his individual responsibility, to compel him to find his own way to a solution. Kierkegaard does not merely talk about self-reliance; his entire literary art is devoted to the promotion of self-reliance."" Jean-Paul Sartre vehemently disagreed"
"because ""Finnegans Wake"", while widely recognized as a masterpiece, was also widely dismissed as unintelligible--""the greatest book that nobody's ever read""; and because they had recognized in ""The Skin of Our Teeth"" (1942), the popular play by Thornton Wilder, an appropriation from Joyce's novel not only of themes but of plot and language as well. ""A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake"" was first published by Harcourt Brace in 1944. A second edition was published by Viking Press in 1968. An unauthorized edition published by Buccaneer Books in 1993 was withdrawn when the Joseph Campbell Foundation complained of copyright infringement. A"
"They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean."" Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that ""the public mind fastens on externals"" such as his ""sea life"", oblivious to how authors transform their material ""from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience"". Nevertheless, Conrad found much sympathetic readership, especially in the United States. H.L. Mencken was one of the earliest and most influential American readers to recognise how Conrad conjured up ""the general out of the particular"". F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing to Mencken, complained about having been omitted"
"both Johannes Kepler and Nicolaus Copernicus, especially in regard to his ""De revolutionibus orbium coelestium"". He is also an expert on Galileo's astronomical observations, and took a leading role in establishing that the watercolor lunar images in a celebrated copy of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius were modern forgeries and not made by Galileo. In 1959, in chapter II of ""The Sleepwalkers"", titled ""The System of Copernicus"", Arthur Koestler wrote that: ""The book that nobody read – the ""Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres"" – was and is an all-time worst-seller."" After reading in the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh a thoroughly annotated copy"
"who sold some 350,000 sets within 20 years of the series' initial publication"". Harvard Classics The Harvard Universal Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, is a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature, compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot and first published in 1909. Eliot had stated in speeches that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. (Originally he had said a three-foot shelf.) The publisher P. F. Collier and Son"
"and care would be needed to avoid skewing the selection. In March 1919, Winston Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) received a pre-publication copy of the Corbett popular history of the navy and objected to certain passages. Churchill wanted official records to be published with the volume so that the public could judge for themselves. Hankey claimed that Churchill's objections made the publication of an official history series questionable, since they would inevitably reflect on leaders, many of whom remained in public life. Hankey wrote that an official history should ""not"" be written, because it would attract parliamentary"
"seller, ""Cultural Literacy"", by E.D. Hirsch Jr., also taps the same anxieties."" Ultimately, Greider concludes that Bloom's agenda is simply vicious attack on the values of young America. He writes, For Greider, it is unfathomable how Bloom could devile the decline in prejudice and relegate that decline to a lack of imagination. He concludes, ""Bloom apparently detests the young."" The linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky dismissed Bloom's book as ""mind-bogglingly stupid"" for ""basically saying ... you just march the students through a canon of 'great thoughts' that are picked out for everybody"" when ""the effect of that is that students"
"came from ""stupid people who don't know what they're talking about because they've never read any of my books"". Although Blyton's works have been banned from more public libraries than those of any other author, there is no evidence that the popularity of her books ever suffered, and by 1990 she was still described as being very widely read. Although some criticised her in the 1950s for the volume of work she produced, Blyton astutely capitalised on being considered a more ""savoury"" English alternative to what was seen by contemporaries as an invasion by American culture in the form of"
"was a clear and graphic writer. He read selectively, preferring the story of David, the ""Odyssey"", the ""Arcadia"", the saga of Burnt Njal, and the ""Grand Cyrus"". Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Boccaccio, Sir Walter Scott, Dumas, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot were some of his favourite authors. He was a rapid, fluent talker. Some of his sayings were shrewd and sharp; but he was sometimes aggressive. 'People admire what is pretty in an ugly thing,' he used to say 'not the ugly thing.' A lady once said to him she would never be happy again. 'What does"
"believes that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the ""forces of resentment"" or a goal of ""improving"" one's society, which he casts as an absurd aim, writing: ""The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools."" His position is that politics has no place in literary criticism: a feminist or Marxist reading of Shakespeare's ""Hamlet"" would reveal something about feminism or Marxism, he says, but likely nothing about ""Hamlet"""
"and Andre Maurois. ""Classic Books"" reading lists now in use at some universities have been in modern vogue since at least the early part of the 20th century, with the additional impetus in 1909 of the Harvard Classics publishing imprimatur having individual works chosen by outgoing Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot. The vogue for these ""Reading Lists"" has continued onto the 21st century, e.g., Jane Mallison's ""Book Smart: Your Essential Reading List for Becoming a Literary Genius in 365 Days"" (2007). Classic book A ""classic"" is a book accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, for example through an imprimatur"
"when he states ""Schools and universities ought to help us understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite."" Clark and Calvino come to a similar conclusion that when a literary work is analyzed for what makes it 'classic', that in just the act of analysis or as Clark says ""the anatomical dissection"", the reader can end up destroying the unique pleasure that mere enjoyment a work of literature can hold. While blogging on the website guardian.co.uk in 2009, Chris"
"list showed a ""profound disrespect for the intellectual capacities of people of color – red, brown or yellow"". Others, such as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., claim the Great Books of the Western World project was inherently unnecessary, saying that an understanding of shared cultural items within books is more important than reading them. Adler was asked in a 1990 interview with the ""Los Angeles Times"" why his Great Books of the Western World list did not include more non-whites and non-Europeans. He attributed the lack of Latino authors to the lack of recommendations by Mexican poet and committee member Octavio"
"Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) stated his answer to the question ""What is a Classic?"" (""Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?""): The idea of a classic implies something that has continuance and consistence, and which produces unity and tradition, fashions and transmits itself, and endures…. A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or"
"well. This is partly because of the negative perception of his personal character and its influence upon his reputation. William Butler Yeats was occasionally critical of Poe and once called him ""vulgar"". Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted to ""The Raven"" by saying, ""I see nothing in it"", and derisively referred to Poe as ""the jingle man"". Aldous Huxley wrote that Poe's writing ""falls into vulgarity"" by being ""too poetical""—the equivalent of wearing a diamond ring on every finger. It is believed that only 12 copies have survived of Poe's first book ""Tamerlane and Other Poems"". In December 2009, one copy"
"Readers were more interested in sensationalist stories about criminals and political corruption than they were in political theory itself. The second most popular category, ""general works"" (those books ""that did not have a dominant motif and that contained something to offend almost everyone in authority""), demonstrated a high demand for generally low-brow subversive literature. However, these works never became part of literary canon and are largely forgotten today as a result. A healthy, legal publishing industry existed throughout Europe, although established publishers and book sellers occasionally ran afoul of the law. For example, the ""Encyclopédie"" condemned not only by the"
"the journalist Theodore White—asked that it be removed when the physical conditions of the library deteriorated. Richard Hofstadter Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916 – October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier approach to history from the far left, in the 1950s he embraced consensus history, becoming the ""iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus,"" largely because of his emphasis on ideas and political culture rather than the day-to-day doings of politicians. His influence is ongoing, as modern critics profess"
"Who Killed Homer? ""Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom,"" is a 1988 book by Classics scholars Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath. Reviewing ""Who Killed Homer?"" for Foreign Affairs, Francis Fukuyama described it as ""ostensibly"" focused on the decline of classical studies, but ""really about the loss of a common, humanistic core in contemporary education and culture."" ""Who Killed Homer?,"" was a polemic book criticizing classics scholars including Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Judith Hallett, and Amy Richlin, who, in the authors' opinion, misinterpreted and debased classical texts in the service of critical theory,"
"up, one critic called the initial 15th edition a ""qualified failure...[that] cares more for juggling its format than for preserving."" More recently, reviewers from the American Library Association were surprised to find that most educational articles had been eliminated from the 1992 , along with the article on psychology. Some very few ""Britannica""-appointed contributors are mistaken. A notorious instance from the ""Britannica's"" early years is the rejection of Newtonian gravity by George Gleig, the chief editor of the 3rd edition (1788–1797), who wrote that gravity was caused by the classical element of fire. The ""Britannica"" has also staunchly defended a"
"reading public, as Freeman himself acknowledged, ""I seem to be either unknown or a subject for mockery"". After Freeman's death in 1892 critical opinion slowly began to change. In 1906 Thomas Hodgkin, without endorsing the accuracy of Freeman's ""History"", called it ""the great quarry from which all later builders will hew their blocks for building"", and as the 20th century advanced the tide continued to turn as academics examined Freeman's ""Norman Conquest"" with renewed interest, even if the general public did not. The historian D. J. A. Matthew considered it ""one of the most cited but least read historical monuments"