franklin rolfe

This is mostly an omnibus of varying types of essays, biography excerpts, short stories, drama in some short stage plays, and differing types of poetry to round it out. Essentially the selections were made by the editors to illustrate the best examples of these forms for students. It was mostly a slog but went surprisingly fast.
The bits that caught my full attention were A Note on Exposition, How I Write Short Stories (Jerome Weidman), Making a Poem (Melville Cane), How to Criticize a Poem (Theodore Spencer), Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics (William Moulton Marston), Reviewing a Novel (Helen E. Haines), The Good Life (Bertrand Russell), The Power of the Written Word (Stephen Vincent Benet), The Problem of Appreciation(Albert C. Barnes) and Recollections of Academic Orgies (H.L. Mencken). Most of these still being excerpts from larger works or collections according to some of the footnotes.
I don't know if I'd recommend this to anyone but a fanatical reader and only if they could find this book at six bucks or cheaper. However, it entertained me and I especially liked The Power of the Written Word from which I can draw a couple of quotes: "[F]ree words and free thinking are an essential part of our democratic process, and that disillusion, for a time, does not mean everlasting despair."
The second: "We need new words also - and great ones - to match the present, to build for the future that must be."
Be warned, also that this book and some of the works are of their time though nothing within seems deliberately mean-spirited (I sped through most of the book). Most of the writing was circa the 1940's and earlier.… (more)