European view

Which 20th century American author called Mark Twain "... a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy."

Answer: William Faulkner.
Who else would be so arrogant? Was he unaware of Twain's immense popularity in Europe?


I wrote today on Aleksanr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author who died Sunday. I recommend that you read his speech "A World Split Apart," delivered in June 1978 at Harvard, creating quite a stir. Just do a Google search. The speech is an insightful look at American culture, just as applicable today as 30 years ago. He brings the objectivity of a non-native born observer, in much the same was as the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville did a century and a half earlier.

It has been years since I tackled Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," the book that did more than any other to expose the brutality of communism. In this time when idealists talk about "saving the world," this Russian writer might actually have done it.