# Worst Author Taught In Public School? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 21, 2000, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770 "2000-12-21T22:30:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Nocturne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9fc348/32.png) [@Nocturne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nocturne)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2000, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/81 "2000-12-24T06:30:10Z")
I don’t really despise authors so much as I despise certain books. Catcher in the Rye was okay, story-wise, but I was a bit put off by the whining and continual cursing. It didn’t seem to me that obscenity really made the character what he was. Still, I would encourage people to read it. Hemingway, Dickens, Hawthorne, et. al have easier-to-stomach novels and some that are…just indigestible. Just MHO. ---
**Author:** ![annalamerino](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b3f665/32.png) [@annalamerino](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/annalamerino)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2000, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/82 "2000-12-24T21:47:54Z")
Mark Twain is way overrated. And the kids just highlight and repeat the hot quotes like this one: “My goodness! A boiler explosion on the steamboat?! Was anyone hurt?” Tom “No’m, killed a nigger.” “Well, that’s good, because sometimes people do get hurt.” Sure it was mean to show the tenor of the times, but Twain was a man of his times as well, and not above racist remarks. ---
**Author:** ![Dignan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f07891/32.png) [@Dignan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dignan)\ **Post date:** [December 24, 2000, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/83 "2000-12-24T23:05:56Z")
I’m not a huge fan of **Annie Dillard**. Had to read some of her short stories, it sucked. Drawn out, just a Thoreau (who I’m not a huge fan of either) wannabe. Teacher kept trying to convince me that she was a good writer because he liked her and she won a Pulitzer. Newsflash, teach: tastes in authors are opinions! ---
**Author:** ![rackensack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e5b9ba/32.png) [@rackensack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rackensack)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2000, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/84 "2000-12-25T03:35:44Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by woodstockbirdybird \* > \*\*I know it’s beginning to sound like there’s an echo in here, but I’m going to agree with Faulkner, Hemmingway, and (especially) Joyce. Was James Joyce adept and brilliant with language? Probably so. Was he readable? Not unless you’re a pretentious lit major with PhD.'s in Comparative Religion and Linguistics. “Ulysses” and (again, especially) “Finnegan’s Wake” were just masturbatory, the literary equivalent of a 30-minute guitar solo. \*\* I sometimes wonder, when I hear comments like this, what would have happened had Joyce never written (or at least never published) _Finnegans Wake_. I think a lot of people take the fact that _FW_ really _is_ almost indeciperable and make that their excuse for hating _Ulysses_, which is difficult but far from impossible. If Joyce’s reputation rested on _Dubliners_, _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, and _Ulysses_, I think a lot more people might read and enjoy those works. ---
**Author:** ![drewbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drewbert/32/15890_2.png) [@drewbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewbert)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2000, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/85 "2000-12-25T18:38:24Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by lee \* > \*\*Joseph Conrad > > The heart of Darkness made a tolerable movie, but as a book it is not fit to read. It sucked the love of literature out of me for over a semester. Conrad’s writing can best be described in languange not fit for this forum. This should not be taught in schools lest it cause our youth to abandon reading entirely. > > \*\* I’m glad someone mentioned him. It wasn’t long before I felt drowsy just _glancing_ at an entire paragraph of that book… and there was stuff in there which I swear was not even grammatical. “Mastery of the English language,” my butt! Fortunately, the teacher gave us the choice of writing an essay on HoD or Apocalypse Now. Guess which I chose. I kinda liked Dickens myself, just not the fact that I had to read three whole novels in one semester. ---
**Author:** ![racinchikki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/eada6e/32.png) [@racinchikki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/racinchikki)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2000, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/86 "2000-12-25T19:41:23Z")
We read The Scarlet Letter last year in Jr Eng. It sucked. At the end of the reading, we had to write papers about a variety of topic choices. They were all like “Explore such-and-such as a symbol” and so on and so forth etc ad nauseum. I chose “Write an informed exposition setting forth your opinion of this novel. THIS IS NOT A BOOK REVIEW. DO NOT SUMMARIZE THE PLOT.” My review was basically: > [@](#): > > Do you like adventure? Do you like romance? Do you like intense, character-driven plots? Then **do not pick up this book**. > Take a Puritan woman with an absentee husband, a child by the local minister, the minister himself, and the minister’s doctor who turns out to be the absentee husband. Nice tight little cast; could turn out an excellent, gripping plot, right? > Not if you’re Nathaniel Hawthorne. I went on for three pages, staying mostly within the boundaries of high-school sensibilities, except that towards the bottom of page 2 I said something about how “sex is an intrinsic part of the background to this story, yet somehow it is never mentioned at all. The closest Hawthorne comes to mentioning this taboo topic is a scene in the forest, where it’s just Hester, Dinsdale and [the kid’s name, which I have forgotten – Pearl?]. Hester actually takes off her bonnet, and they dare to call each other something besides Honored Sir and Mistress Prynne! Why, it’s practically X-rated!” So yeah, I vote for Hawthorne. I hated that book. ---
**Author:** ![Ben](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/df788c/32.png) [@Ben](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ben)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2000, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/87 "2000-12-25T20:27:07Z")
I remember talking to a friend of mine about _The Red Badge of Courage_, which, incidentally, I haven’t read, but have started several times. It’s not that I find it boring- I just can’t get through it somehow. Anyway, the gist of the conversation was that RBoC (hey- if it were _a_ red badge, the acronym would spell “cobra” backwards…) is actually a very complicated book, but when it’s taught in high school it’s reduced to “He learned how to be brave.” After a while, we came to the conclusion that books for high school are chosen on the basis of a few simple criteria: 1. Short. RBoC wins that one! 2. No sex. 3. No dirty words. (Hence “Catcher in the Rye”, whose main audience is high school students, is never assigned for them. Then again, if I were writing a book for high school students, I’d deliberately put in dirty words in order to make sure that no teacher mangled it.) 4. Easy to boil down into a soundbite moral. I consider myself fortunate that I managed to avoid reading most of the classics for class, so I can enjoy reading them now, as an adult, when I can better appreciate them. I also had a very good English teacher who read us “The Miller’s Tale” in class, with, IIRC, some warnings not to tell anyone that she was doing so. As for the author to be worst taught, it’s hard for me to contribute much, since my teacher was so good, but I’d suggest Shakespeare. Although I like reading Shakespeare, I do so having seen plenty of plays performed before, so I have some grasp of how to read a play. Plus, I just don’t like Romeo and Juliet- it seems to me that it is not even remotely on the same level as, say, Hamlet or Merchant of Venice, and I suspect that they teach it because it has no sex, no dirty words, and can be condensed into a soundbite. Incidentally, I find it interesting (and unfortunate) that to most people, the “classics” are what you read in high school. I consider _Pale Fire_ and _Naked Lunch_ to be classics, but you will never see them being taught in high school. -Ben ---
**Author:** ![Nacho4Sara](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Nacho4Sara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nacho4Sara)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2000, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/88 "2000-12-25T20:57:14Z")
Oh lordy, this English major is sputtering at the screen. Shakespeare? _Dickens??_ Hemingway and Fitzgerald??? I’m about to cry. I adore all of these authors. I’m not nearly as well-versed in Shakespeare as DRY, but I do worship him. And I am so thankful that my teachers taught me to love _Romeo & Juliet, Great Expectations, The Old Man and the Sea,_ and _The Great Gatsby_. They led me to discover _Twelfth Night, MacBeth, Hamlet, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, A Farewell to Arms,_ and _Tender is the Night_ on my own. That being said, I agree with Faulkner - he should not be taught in high school. I had no idea what he was saying in tenth grade - someone compared him to “a syphilitic monkey,” which is fitting. However, I attended a graduate-level Faulkner seminar at the permission of my Amer.Lit. professor, and I loved him! Much better the second time around. I was lucky enough to be in an international program, so I also read Chinua Achebe, Henrik Ibson, Kamala Markandaya, Tolstoy, and Flaubert (_Madame Bovary_ and _Anna Karenina_ are two of my favorites). I know people who read Shakespeare and Hemingway every year of high school English, and I guess the variety of subject and setting helped a lot. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [December 25, 2000, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/89 "2000-12-25T20:59:03Z")
Okay, I’ve had enough. I have to defend a few authors here. **Hemingway** : He writes short, concise sentences that can be as to the point as a needle. He does not agonize over detail, nor does he dally in irrelevant sidetracks. Instead, he writes from life without sounding pretentious or tormented. When he is read, the text itself, the little chickenmarks on the page, do not detract from the story or the style. He simply writes to tell a story and make a point. **Salinger** : He is the only author I have yet seen who can write from the point of view of a socially disturbed person and not sound like he’s forcing it. _The Catcher in the Rye_ is one of the best coming-of-age novels because it never hits you over the head with symbolism or brags about how ‘different’ the main character is. The author just lets the story speak for itself, and in that way makes it effective. ---
**Author:** ![Amok](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f17d59/32.png) [@Amok](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amok)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2000, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/90 "2000-12-26T20:55:03Z")
It is funny how people can read the same work and come to exact opposite conclusions. For instance, I love _Heart of Darkness_; it’s definetely one of my favorite books. There are passages that I can not read without being struck by their beauty. There’s a couple of passages early on in the book that get me every time; one is the unnamed narrator’s (not Marlow, but the man who listens to Marlow tell his story on the river boat) description of the Thames. Another is Marlow’s musings on what it would have been like to be a Roman come to Britain during their period of settlement. And yet others have persumably read those passages and thought “how boring” or “Conrad couldn’t write”. For what it’s worth, I did not read the book in high school. I got interested in the subject a few years ago, and decided to read the book, and ended up liking it. The only Conrad we read in my school was _The Secret Sharer_, which, though there are passages that I think are very well written, has never quite appealed to me. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2000, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/91 "2000-12-26T21:11:17Z")
Great defense of Conrad, **Amok**. _Heart of Darkness_ has appealed to me like few other works in the English language. It is dreamy yet incredibly concise. The reader must have patience, however, and allow himself to be captivated by Conrad’s incredibly prose. And for those of you bitching about _Moby Dick_…has anyone ever read _Billy Budd_? That is truly a monstrosity. ---
**Author:** ![Tretiak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a88e57/32.png) [@Tretiak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tretiak)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2000, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/92 "2000-12-26T21:43:37Z")
He clicked his mouse and glanced at the screen. Faulkner and Dickens seemed to have many detractors. Somewhat more surprising were Joyce, Shakespeare and Twain. He pondered these a bit. Then he saw Hemingway’s name. His finger twitched along the surface of the mouse. This was not right, Hemingway, he felt, was a truly great writer. Yet, here where the digerati met he was confounded that some were of the opposite opinion. He clicked the mouse. He responded. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_the\_Immortal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6de8d8/32.png) [@Max\_the\_Immortal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_the_Immortal)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2000, 10:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/93 "2000-12-27T10:45:33Z")
Shakespeare. Why teach subject matter written in archaic English when most students haven’t gotten modern English mastered? Plus, Shakespeare is terribly overrated. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2000, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/94 "2000-12-27T13:24:01Z")
Do not bash Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote about issues right at the heart of human life. He wrote about love, hate, self-doubt, and life itself. Shakespeare did not write in a ‘foreign language’ or ‘obscure dialect’ either. His language is just as much English as Huckleberry Finn’s in Mark Twain’s novel. All it takes to understand it is a little patience and some reading skills. Footnotes are provided in any decent rendition of his works. Besides, Shakespeare influenced the rest of English, and then American, art, culture, and civilization immensely. Every good author references his works at least once. Most of the movies today have plots essentially the same as his. And everyone should know his soliloquys, if only to hear how well the English language can be used. Follow this link and be enlightened: [http://www.cowtown.net/users/chashays/hamlet.txt](http://www.cowtown.net/users/chashays/hamlet.txt) ---
**Author:** ![Poysyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f4b2a3/32.png) [@Poysyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Poysyn)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2000, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/95 "2000-12-27T15:07:26Z")
I too HATED Heart of Darkness. I love to read, almost anything. But this book \, this book, I LOATHE. I was supposed to read it for grade 12 English, I got through all fo the others, including Crime and Punishment and A Separate Peace and enjoyed them. Then I got to Conrad, YUCK. ---
**Author:** ![Eve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Eve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eve)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2000, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/96 "2000-12-27T15:46:07Z")
annalamerino—the point of those racist phrases in Twain is that he was skewering the idiots who used them. It was a subtle point, though, and one that many people, it seems, fail to grasp. By the way, I have tried to like Twain and I just don’t—not for political reasons; he just ain’t my cup of tea. Now, William Dean Howells and Booth Tarkington? Can’t get enough of 'em! ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2000, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/97 "2000-12-27T17:28:07Z")
Thank you **Maeglin** , I’m happy to see that I’m not the only one who loved “Heart of Darkness”. I think it was an amazing piece of literature, and quite frankly, I feel that I am better equipped as a reader and an author now, having read it. Maybe it’s the teacher that makes the books horrible. Every single book that is mentioned here that people hated (Well, the ones I have read anyway) I loved. But I’ve had some amazing teachers. I’m struggling to understand why people hate _The Scarlett Letter_, a book that changed my whole life. Or _Heart of Darkness_, a book that stunned me with its beauty. I never understood why people disliked _Catcher in the Rye_. Maybe they have never experienced what the Halden was talking about? Me? The whole time I was reading it I was like, “Yeah, that’s me! Fuck, I’m not the only one.” Oh, the list can go on and on and on. I guess it’s just interesting what some people take from what they read, whether it be good or bad. ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2000, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/98 "2000-12-27T22:21:10Z")
Eve wrote: > [@](#): > > [Eve sobbing prettily into her lace handkerchief over the emptiness of the lives of those who do not love Messrs. Dickens and Hawthorne, and that nice Miss Bronte] That **nice** miss Bronte?! I’ll have you know I just (just!) finished chugging my way through _Wuthering Heights_ last night. I’ve been out of school for almost a decade now, so the decision to read it was one not made for me by any schoolteacher. I read it because it was “supposed” to be a classic, and I felt like I “ought” to read it. I will never, ever get back those precious, precious hours of my life I squandered reading that mountain of dreck. It’s page after page after mind-numbing page describing a dysfunctional family. Who the hell wants to read about somebody else’s dysfunctional family? “Ooh, but it’s a **rich** dysfunctional family! That makes it all worth while!” Like hell it does. And why the hell didn’t Cathy Junior just annull her forced marriage to Heathcliff Lynton, and get all her property back that way? She could have easily gotten it annulled because her marriage was obviously never consummated – I can’t imagine anybody in this straight-laced hyper-Victorian story so much as touching anyone else below the waist. Oh, and I just looked up “wuthering” in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. It means “blowing with a dull roaring sound”. Well, this book definitely blows, that’s for sure. ---
**Author:** ![Ptahlis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a8b319/32.png) [@Ptahlis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ptahlis)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/99 "2000-12-28T15:41:04Z")
Twain? People don’t like Twain? Jeez, even though I hear this from time to time it still hits me like someone saying they don’t like multiple orgasms. Okay, I can understand the criticisms of the other authors even when I disagree, but when someone says they don’t like Twain it causes a fatal exception error in my skull, causing my brain to reboot. Books I hated: Catcher in the Rye. Yes, Salinger does a great job portraying a self-absorbed, callous little twit completely obsessed with his own pleasure and wallowing in the disillusionment of growing up. Still, that doesn’t make this book enjoyable or worth the time. I could watch MTVs The Real World and get the same effect. The Old Man and the Sea. Yes, I GET the stupid Christ metaphor already. Okay, man against the elements. Got it. Next time, might you try these points out in a story mildly more interesting than a test pattern? The House of Seven Gables. By the third chapter, is there anyone who doesn’t know that the papers are behind the painting, and she’s going to marry the artist and end the curse? Most everything else I liked, or at least didn’t dislike all that much. My nomination for Best Book Assigned in School: To Kill a Mockingbird. ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2000, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770/100 "2000-12-28T17:45:55Z")
Ptahlis wrote: > [@](#): > > Twain? People don’t like Twain? Jeez, even though I hear this from time to time it still hits me like someone saying they don’t like multiple orgasms. Twain gives you multiple orgasms?! :eek: [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-author-taught-in-public-school/46770.md?page=6)