Stephen Hawking liked to joke about his ambitions for A Brief History of Time:
“I’m so ambitious that I want my book to be sold in airport bookstalls.”
A goal even more ambitious than Hawking’s bestsellerdom and celebrity would be…to see your book a standard of high school English. Because then, for the rest of their lives, people would be checking back with their teenage selves to see if what your book told them kept on making sense.
Short works with not too much sex–didn’t you all read these?
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- King Lear
- Death of a Salesman
These are the ones I remember, because these are the ones made me cry then and kept on making sense afterward.
You can get learned texts on Death of a Saleman; you can get a DVD of it with Lee J. Cobb and George Segal (1966) or with Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich(1985).
One of my own very favorite Willy Lomans was Kevin Klines’s wonderful loopy dinner theatre rendition in the movie Soapdish (1991). (Horrifyingly, the scenes were said to be based on an actual Florida dinner-theater production starring Vincent Gardenia and Julie Harris. Shudder!)
I was reminded of Willy Loman today by a touching article called ”
The F word” (it’s “Fired,” in case you don’t know.) The author, James Atlas, took comfort from thoughts of Willy as his young boss told him his job was ending. Reading Atlas’s story, I realized again how ignorant, back in the sixties, were my teenage tears for Willy. It’s something I don’t mind being reminded of….and I hope James Atlas keeps writing.