I DID NOT KNOW THAT

If ya don’t read, ya can’t write, and if ya don’t learn, ya can’t teach.  Christmas season afforded me some recreational as opposed to work-related reading time for a change…and whaddaya know, I learned some stuff.

I grew up reading the work of Dashiell Hammett, who created the original hard-boiled private eye genre with characters like Sam Spade.  I had always heard the author’s first name pronounced “DASH-ee-ell,” or occasionally “DAY-she-ell.”  Turns out the man himself pronounced it “da-SHEEL.”  Learned it from the superbly researched bio, “The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett” by Nathan Ward.

Likewise, I was a little kid when I read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Little kids tend not to pick up subtleties.  Reading Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s recently published “Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee,” I found the following:

“In 1949 in an essay  titled ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel,’ James Baldwin wrote that Stowe was ‘not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer,’ author of ‘a very bad novel’ whose sticky sentimentality gave life to racial stereotypes while denying life and complexity to its black characters; the book, Baldwin believed, promoted rather than challenged prejudice based on color and race: the only black characters in the novel who manifest intelligence, initiative, and independence, he reminds us, do so in direct proportion to the lightness of their skin.”

I totally missed that as a young boy, and am going to have to reread “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

If you folks out there have had any such “Damn—I didn’t know that” moments lately, you’re invited to share them here.

 

 

 

 

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