From the Reader's Manifesto in the Atlantic:
<<The decline of American prose since the 1950s is nowhere more apparent than in the decline of the long sentence.>>
Huh? This guy thinks the length of sentences is correlated with quality? And what decline is he talking about? There is nothing called "American prose", there is just writing, done by many different people. If the author means that we don't have, today, the equivalents of Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck, well, that's not really an argument for or against anything. I think the general level of writing (in fiction, but also very notably in nonfiction) is much higher today than 50 years ago. Let's remember,also, that Hemingway and Faulkner were mocked for their "bad prose" for their entire lives, parodies were written and so forth.
I don't see the point in this article, frankly. All the efforts of E.B. White to tell people to cut it out, and now this reviewer longs for the long sentence?
I bet this Myers thinks that Elmore Leonard is a shit of a "prose artist"! LOL!
mrt
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