SEVEN LITERARY QUESTIONS
1.) Who was the most influential post-World War II American novelist?
2.) Which famed literary publication was founded with Random House money as a corporate ad vehicle during a major newspaper strike?
3.) Which canonical author’s cousin headed a Cold War CIA-front arts organization designed to steer literature into safe directions?
4.) Which innovative writer was once left by American soldiers in a cage on an airport tarmac in the hot sun, for hours?
5.) Which American populist novelist, forerunner of the Beats, went from being an acclaimed author to writing screenplays for low-budget monster movies?
6.) Which literary critic, after writing a scathing article in the Atlantic about the pretentiousness of American literary fiction, received a torrent of vitriol and denunciations from book reviewers, novelists, and corporate publishing power brokers? (The person currently lives in South Korea.)
7.) Which over-the-top pulp novel was praised by both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud for exploring realms of the unconscious?
(Please give your answers below.)
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THE CORRECT ANSWER for #1: Ayn Rand– if we’re talking influence outside the tiny box of literature, but on the world. On the direction of our civilization. Venture capitalists, mega-billionaires, self-obsessed ambitious egoists like Trump and Musk, a flood of tech hustlers who believe iimplicitly or explicitly in her ideology, on to a corporate-oriented no-business-restrictions Supreme Court, and one has to acknowledge we fully live in a Randian universe.
-KW
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heck. True. There’s still that ridiculous prize
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THE ANSWER for #2: The New York Review of Books– from the start a voice for the corporate publishing establishment.
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THE ANSWER for #3: Vladimir Nabokov’s cousin, Nicolas Nabokov, was Secretary General at the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950 to steer culture and literature in a moderate, non-polemical direction. The Nabokovs were from a family of wealthy Russian nobility forced to flee the country during the Bolshevik Revolution. They were understandably hostile to all things on the left, including art smacking of populism. Nicolas worked first in the Cold War cause at Voice of America– where Vladimir also sought employment when he arrived in America, but was passed over.
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THE ANSWER for #4: At the end of World War II in 1945, pro-Fascist poet Ezra Pound was detained for three weeks in an outdoor steel cage at a U.S. military camp near Pisa, Italy.
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THE ANSWER for #5: Aben Kandel wrote the highly acclaimed novel, City for Conquest, in 1936. It was made into a melodramatic movie starring Jimmy Cagney. In the 1950s and 60s Kandel was screenwriter for “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” and Joan Crawford’s final execrable film, “Trog.”
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THE ANSWER for #6: B.R. Myers. Here’s an interesting short article by Jim Nelson which examines the controversy: https://j-nelson.net/2021/07/twenty-years-later-b-r-myers-a-readers-manifesto/
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THE ANSWER for #7: The classic 1887 adventure novel She by English author H. Rider Haggard. Both Freud and Jung wrote articles about it, with a few interesting things to say.
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