This Week in Reading November 2 - 8

Just so you know, there will be much to read in the future about this week in history because of the monumental event that has happened to America .There are two Nobel prizewinning authors this week: Albert Camus, the existentialist French novelist and poet Odysseus Elytis from Greece. Essayist Andre Malraux and historian Will Durant are known names. Besides those, it's novelists galore again with Margaret Mitchell and James Jones leading the pack of lesser knowns. Along with them -- born on a day which is often apropriately enough Election Day -- are the famous humorist Will Rogers and equally revered, but still living to see what happened this week, newscaster Walter Cronkite.

This Week's Question: Which of this week's authors said the following? "Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators." Which one said this? "... I don't think it ever hurts the writer to sort of stand back now and then and look at his stuff as if he were reading it instead of writing it."

Answer to Last Week's Question: Napoleon Hill was a young reporter who was given the assignment to interview some successful men. Among the first he encountered was Andrew Carnegie who liked the concept so much he gave Hill letters of Introduction to the most successful people of the day. Hill spent years then learning and then distilling what he called the "Philosophy of Achievement" and later with Carnegie published home study courses called "The Law of Success." As part of that path he edited his own magazine entitled Hill's Golden Rule.

Emily Post was born into money and attended finishing school. After marriage difficulties she needed to write to support herself and turned to magazine article and story writing. After a while she wrote travel books with humor in them, and several novels (none of which the library has, sad to say.) Her ettiquette books, through she became the country's leading authority, grew out of a column she had written about the topic.