Stanley Fish

LitStack Recs: How to Read to Read a Sentence and How to Write One & American Elsewhere

How to Read to Read a Sentence and How to Write One, by Stanley Fish For writers, the sentence is the coin of the realm, the catch that holds a reader fast to a story. And I love that Stanley Fish wrote a book just about sentences. A professor of […]

LitStack Rec: How to Read a Sentence… & The Butcher of Anderson Station

How to Read a Sentence and How to Write One, by Stanley Fish The sentence is the coin of the realm, the catch that keeps a reader securely in a story, and Stanley Fish wrote a book just about sentences. A professor of law and dean emeritus at the College […]

LitStack Recs: How to Write a Sentence: And How To Read One & My Father’s Arms Are a Boat

How to Read to Read a Sentence and How to Write One, by Stanley Fish The sentence is the coin of the realm, the catch that holds a reader fast to a story. And I love that Stanley Fish wrote a book just about sentences. A professor of law and […]

Birthdays

On this day, June 17, in 1871, poet and activist James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His very first successful poem was Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, which was originally performed by 500 school children to honor Booker T. Washington. Later, Johnson’s brother Rosamond put the poem to music and it became the unofficial “Negro National Anthem”. Along with publishing his own poetry, he compiled a seminal anthology of spirituals, and the acclaim that his efforts brought to black verse made him a vital figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; he would later become one of the most influential leaders in the NAACP. He died in 1938 when his car was hit by a train; he was 67.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.