Friday, August 1, 2008

Writers on Writers

Name the writer who made each of these statements about another writer:

1. The undisputed fame enjoyed by Shakespeare as a writer ... is, like every other lie, a great evil.
2. (On Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) His didactics are all out of place. He has written brilliant poems, by accident; that is to say, when permitting his genius to get the better of his conventional habit of thinking.
3. (On James Joyce) The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
4. (On Aldous Huxley) Huxley's book ... is awful. And do you notice that the more holy he gets, the more his books stink with sex? he cannot get off the subject of flagellating women.
5. Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.

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