Catcher in the Rye and TKMockingbird out of American Schools

[Coito ergo sum]

Nothing but strawmen! People like you always come out with this kind of thing! I only tried to reason with you but you jumped down my throat! AND STOP CALLING ME GAY!!1!!!

Err... what?

Good point you made, though.... it is kind of curious that Toole never wrote another book after his posthumously published "Confederacy of Dunces." You got me there.

And, what's wrong with calling you gay? Are you saying there is something insulting about being called gay? Bigot!

[Drewish]

What's with your anti-bigotry bias?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

What's with your anti-bigotry bias?

What's with your anti-anti-bigotry bias?

[Drewish]

What's with your anti-bigotry bias?

What's with your anti-anti-bigotry bias?

Your gay.

[Coito ergo sum]

What's with your anti-bigotry bias?

Am a rabid anti-bigotist.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

What's with your anti-bigotry bias?

What's with your anti-anti-bigotry bias?

Your gay.

Yes, you are.

[Drewish]

You don't own me!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You don't own me!

If I did I'd trade you in for a new Mazda.

[hadespussercats]

Just to clarify-- I think insulting someone by calling him gay goes with a poor grasp on the proper use of apostrophes.

But I thought gays liked to be grasped by the apostrophes?

You bigot!

[hadespussercats]

Coito, you point out all these one-hit-novelists who died after their first novel was published as though that means they shouldn't be considered.

So, someone who's mentally troubled enough to become too drunk to write, or to kill themselves, or to become a hermit, or what have you, after managing to get one novel written and published, is nothing that would make you think they're plagiarists. But someone who can't for whatever reason get any of her book-length projects together enough to attempt publication after having one successful novel seems totally fishy to you?

Writers are pretty notorious for being mercurial and weird, and for carrying around a lot of baggage that gets in the way of getting their work done. Strange you think the possibility of that in Harper Lee's case makes her an outlier, or that she very well might have faked her whole career.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Nothing but strawmen! People like you always come out with this kind of thing! I only tried to reason with you but you jumped down my throat! AND STOP CALLING ME GAY!!1!!!

Err... what?

Good point you made, though.... it is kind of curious that Toole never wrote another book after his posthumously published "Confederacy of Dunces." You got me there.

Seriously, there are lots of writers that had one successful and then never published again - the ones that I listed were the top of the obvious list!

Of course, in some cases, death followed quickly on their initial success - Margaret Mitchell, Emily Brontë, Anna Sewell. However, that is by no means always the case. Oscar Wilde wrote only a single novel and abandoned the format due to the adverse criticism it received. Boris Pasternak stopped writing because of the way the Soviet Union clamped down on his work - he even refused to claim his Nobel prize due to political pressure! Toole couldn't get ACOD published and this led to a spiral of depression that resulted in his suicide (or so the story goes - it is more likely that the depression came first and his reaction to his novel being rejected for publication was simply another symptom.)

However, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was published in 1952 and he lived until 1994 without ever publishing another novel. His reasons resonate very closely with Lee's - he was a perfectionist that never considered anything that he wrote to be good enough. He tried writing a second novel but never completed it - 300 pages were lost in a house fire but he kept on trying and wrote 2000 pages without finishing by the time he died. Like Lee, he published several articles and essays during this period - he just never came up with another novel that he thought worthy of publication - something that is probably to our great loss!

Also, another glaring example of a writer that simply stopped writing following success is one of your heroes! J.D.Salinger, despite his fame, published NOTHING between the early 60s and his death 2 years ago!


Despite your claims to an independent derivation, the "Did Harper Lee actually write Mockingbird? Or was it Capote?" controversy has been around for decades and never seems to fuck off like it ought to! Capote couldn't have written that book - it is simply not in his style of writing and (IMO) is far too fucking good (in as much as its style is so seemingly easy-going and unobtrusively, effortlessly addictive that you CANNOT stop reading come the end of a chapter!) He is, however, essential to the book, by way of being the person that badgered Lee to publish the thing until she finally submitted it. His displeasure at its outselling anything that he wrote by a huge margin is well documented - there is no fucking chance that he would have concealed the fact that he wrote it if it were true!

He is also the inspiration for Dill in the book.