Word: dullest
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Dullest Authors Lawrence Number One -James Tied for Second...
Epilogue to the recent syndicated siege of " Books That Have Helped Me Most," "Books to Take On a Desert Island," and their like, eleven well known writers and critics, questioned by Vanity Fair, " Who are, to your mind, the ten dullest authors "I " make frank confession of their pet literary abominations. The questionees are as diverse as possible -George Jean Nathan, Christopher Morley, Edna Ferber, James Branch Cabell, Hugh Walpole are five of the number - and they certainly agitate the pedestals of many accepted literary deities...
...realism. As a matter of fact, to the limited population of a desert is- land, Robinson Crusoe would have about as much charm as a shopping list. What to us is the essence of romance would be to him the acme of the commonplace. A photographic description of the dullest incidents of daily life in the sordid haunts of civilization, on the other hand, would become to him a golden fairytale, a realization of all his fondest dreams, colored at once with reminiscence and with hope...
...motion pictures have revivified the writer of circus showhills. Once again the family may crowd joyously about the lamp, eyes agog, to read the English language written with a flamboyancy that thrills the dullest. Poor Barnum's "Stupendous and Unparalleled Aggregation of Freaks" fades before this advertisement in a New York Sunday paper...
...result of the "scientific culture" of modern Germany. Method was exalted above character. It was held that all learning was of equal educational value, provided only that it was scientifically pursued. History became a searching of documents; literature became philology. Shakespeare and Chaucer were no more important than the dullest Middle-English dialect. The result was that the field of learning was divided into innumerable "courses" and "half courses," the Theory of Photography counting as much for a degree as the basic principles of biology. A systematic, organic grouping of studies was difficult. An American university education became a thing...