Negative Reviews of Literary Classics Quiz

Answer: Lolita

"Lolita" is a novel about a middle-aged literature professor who is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather. Although it is considered a classic today, it remains controversial because of its subject matter.

A review by Orville Prescott of the "New York Times" (1958) included the remarks in the question, as well as the following:

"Mr. Nabokov...does not write cheap pornography. He writes highbrow pornography..."

"There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive...".

Answer: "The Great Gatsby" (F Scott Fitzgerald)

"The Great Gatsby" is from the Jazz Age (1920s); the other three novels are from the 1930s and do not take place on Long Island.

Some of the reviews it generated included the following:

"For our part, 'The Great Gatsby' might just as well be called Ten Nights on Long Island..." (review by Ralph Coghlan, "St. Louis Dispatch", 1925).

"What has never been alive cannot very well go on living. So this is a book of the season only...This story is obviously unimportant...what ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people. It is not that they are false: it is that they are taken too much for granted. Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes - often astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive..." and "...no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that" (review by HL Mencken, "Chicago Tribune", 1925).

Answer: "To Kill a Mockingbird" (Harper Lee)

"To Kill a Mockingbird" was published in 1960. Upon its release, most reviews were favourable but not all were kind. The "Atlantic Monthly" termed it "sugar water served with humour".

Flannery O'Connor, a rival author, belittled it as a children's book: "I think for a child's book it does all right...it's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book."

The comment quoted in the question was from a review by Granville Hicks in "The Saturday Review" (1960).

Answer: Brave New World

Although "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley is now considered a classic, it was not well-received when first published. It was frequently banned due to sex and drug references. In this novel, set in a futuristic society, babies are mass-produced, conditioned to fulfill a particular role in society, and drugged to achieve a state of "happiness". Aldous Huxley explores the dangers of technology and what it can do to society. (I wonder what he would make of today's technology).

Some of the reviews included the following comments:

"Nothing can bring it alive" and "(he) rushes headlong into the great pamphleteering movement...(it) is a lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda" (review by Margaret Cheney Dawson, "New York Herald Tribune", 1932).

H. G. Wells was personally offended by "Brave New World" because his own novel, "Men Like Gods" (1923), was allegedly the inspiration behind Huxley's novel. In 1931, while he was writing "Brave New World", Huxley told a friend that he was "writing a novel about the future - on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it." Wells said "A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book".

Answer: "Gone With the Wind" (Margaret Mitchell)

Despite winning a Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1937, "Gone With the Wind" has drawn considerable criticism, not only for its length, but also for historical inaccuracies, and for painting an unrealistic and romanticized picture of life in the South, particularly with respect to the issue of slavery.

The comment quoted in the question was from a review by Ralph Thompson for the "New York Times" (1936).

Answer: Ulysses

James Joyce's "Ulysses" is a novel whose story, set in Dublin, Ireland, in 1904, loosely parallels the story of Homer's epic poem, "Odyssey". Ulysses is the Latin name for the Greek hero, Odysseus.

The quote contained in the question was from a review by Arnold Bennett in "The Bookman" (a periodical), 1922.

Harvard academic, Irving Babbit, declared that, "It could only have been written in an advanced stage of psychic disintegration."

Other reactions included "The average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it...save bewilderment and a sense of disgust" (Joseph Collins, "New York Times", 1922) and "In Ireland they try to make a cat clean by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject" (George Bernard Shaw).

Answer: Wuthering Heights

In 1847, James Lorimer, of the "North British Review", a Scottish periodical, denigrated both Charlotte and Emily Brontė's works with the following review of "Wuthering Heights", Emily Bronte's only novel:

"Here all the faults of "Jane Eyre" (by Charlotte Brontė) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read."

Answer: Pride and Prejudice

Mark Twain certainly didn't appreciate the novel. In a letter to Joseph Twitchell (1898), he said "Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin bone." (One wonders, therefore, why he read it more than once).

A friend recommended the novel to Charlotte Brontė, who wrote back with the comment: "Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point" (letter to G. H. Lewes, 1848).

Ralph Waldo Emerson stated, "I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seems to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and so narrow...Suicide is more respectable."

Answer: Anne of Green Gables

"The author's probable intention was to exhibit a unique development in this little asylum waif, but there is no real difference between the girl at the end of the story and the one at the beginning of it." This "New York Times" book review (1908) was written about Anne Shirley, also known as Anne of Green Gables.

"Anne of Green Gables" was the first in a series of books by Lucy Maud Montgomery. In my opinion, this reviewer really missed the mark, firstly, by assuming they knew the author's intention and secondly, because Anne does grow and mature as the book, and the book series, progresses.

Answer: The Grapes of Wrath

"The Grapes of Wrath" won the the National Book Award in 1939, the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and was cited as a contributing factor towards John Steinbeck's Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

However, not everybody liked it: "The chapters in which Steinbeck halts the story to editorialize about American life are sometimes useful, but oftener pretentious and flatulent" (Louis Kronenberger, "The Nation", 1939).

The "San Francisco Examiner" dismissed it as communist propaganda: "The arguments are selected from the customary communistic sources and arguments... Consistency is not, and any informed reader knows that it cannot be, a quality either of the Communistic mind or Communist propaganda".