inappropriate for 20th century inner-city youth?
Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man?” The affluent should not read Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath?” Should we Americans learn calculus even though the ancient Greeks first invented it? We read great literature not because of the ethnicity of its author or time in which he or she walked the earth, but because their stories illuminate universal human values and foibles. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the failure to appreciate a sad but beautiful book about human weakness and loss like the “Scarlet Letter” speaks more about you and your peers than it does about the quality of the book or lack thereof. Q: You seem to me pretentious, elitist and, to me, very bourgeois – every much art-for-art’s sake and not for social action. I prefer writers and writing which is totally contemporary and committed. You seem stuck in the past, a walking ghoul who uses the language of Tolstoy and the other 19th century novelists today at the end of the 20th century. Your writing is dead as a d
