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Joel Bowman's avatar

Personally, I couldn't care less if these petulant re-writers/art vandals love or hate Kipling, or want Oompa Loompa's to be transgender, or think "black" tractors is somehow a racist descriptor (they actually nixed that adjective from Fantastic Mr. Fox, fearing it might send the "wrong message")...

...but let these do-gooders write their own damned novels, if indeed they can!

As someone who has dedicated a good portion of the past few years to realizing his life-long dream of becoming a failed novelist, I can heartily attest to Thomas Mann's wry observation: "A writer is someone for whom the act of writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Real writing is hard, in other words. Censoring the dead, meanwhile, is as simple-minded as it is cowardly. Putting words in the mouths of those who can no longer speak, and sullying their reputation with this bilious nonsense, seems to me the height of pretension. A pox on all their houses!

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Benjamin's avatar

This is one of my favorite articles from NS. Your argument about “A-students” is well articulated.

This information about the censoring of past works is all the poignant as I just read 1984 by Orwell last month. It’s a page right out of the book. This whole story creeps me out. It’s one thing to edit websites or stories published online, but it feels like we are in a new realm when people start editing past works of art. Work that they didn’t create and have no claim over.

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