September 2013 – Absalom, Absalom!

(via Professor Says He Has Solved a Mystery Over a Slave’s Novel – NYT)

One of the reasons I enjoy archival research so much is how much there remains of everyday lives, lying dormant, waiting to be pieced back together.

Reblogged without comment

classicpenguin:

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
William Golding’s 1954 novel The Lord of the Flies has been in the censorship cross-hairs of American parents for decades. Those attempting to ban the book have done so on the grounds that it is excessively violent, racist, and “implies that man is little more than an animal.” But Golding, a schoolteacher himself, wrote the book in response to an 1858 novel by R. M. Ballantyne, TheCoral Island, in which a group of young boys stranded on a desert island get along quite swimmingly. Though Golding enjoyed the book, his experience with schoolchildren led him to take the morality of the situation in…a different direction.

Except this: http://bit.ly/15pW7F2