Prof. Boyd: 'Read (and Write) Better Books' - Don't Waste Time on Authors' Subpar, Superfluous Work
July 25, 2017
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Writing in The Huffington Post, Betsy Boyd, lecturer in the University of Baltimore's Klein Family School of Communications Design, says that the current trend toward studying an author's previously unreleased or posthumously published works may prove to be a scholarly dead end. Writers like the late Edward Albee, who did not want his unfinished work to see the light of day, have a good point, Boyd says.
"Writers—great writers—especially as time goes by, are probably the best judges of their own obsessive processes, or they wouldn't churn out and publish the hard-won final products that they do," Boyd writes. "What advantage lies in reading Nabokov's incomplete index-card scribbled novel, The Original of Laura, transcribed by his adoring son 100 percent against the author's wishes? What advantage, for that matter, in picking up Harper Lee's unfortunately named and almost universally panned second book, Go Set a Watchman, brought to print only after the singular novelist fell into the clutches of dementia?
Boyd praises the demand by Albee, a playwright who specified that his unpublished works be destroyed by the executors of his estate.
"Amen," she says of this kind of creative oversight from beyond the grave, known as "dead hand control."
"Will my students who choose to pursue a Ph.D. in literary criticism wind up bereft without the full spectrum of Albee, without all of Joan Didion's random brilliant notebook musings, without every scrap of Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? In fact, with the furious pace of life as it is, I think they'll be grateful for the dead hand control that (sometimes) leaves them without superfluous clutter to sift through....
"As I tell my students, 'Time is shorter than ever. Read better books. If you must, try to write them.'"
Read Boyd's article in The Huffington Post.
Learn more about Betsy Boyd and the Klein Family School of Communications Design.