Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Bad Reviews of Great Books

From an 1848 review of Wuthering Heights:
How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.” — Graham’s Lady’s Magazine, 1848
And I cannot resist one more:
It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.” – Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Atlantic, “Literature as an Art,” 1867
And 13 others, all enjoyable. The takedowns of Moby Dick and Ulysses stand out.

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