The Human Stain
In 1990's America, the Human Stain is the story told by Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who lives a secluded life until the aging classics professor Coleman Silk becomes his new neighbor.
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- You may be referring to the Philip Roth incident. (There are a number of such incidents, but this is perhaps the most famous).
Essentially, the article on Roth's book The Human Stain (an excellent book by the way) cited a New York Times critic as saying that the main character may have been inspired by a particular person. Roth's agent attempted to remove this (Roth says that he was not inspired by this person). However, there was no published source that indicated that Roth felt this way, just Roth's agent's communication with Wikipedia volunteers. So Roth published an article in The New Yorker as a means of establishing a published source that could be used to refute the claim.
I think the ultimate resolution was to say something like "New York Times critic says Roth was inspired by... but Roth says..."
This is a case where both sides were partially right. It's perfectly encyclopedic to note that a major critic believes that an author was inspired by a particular person. However, there should have been a better mechanism for the author to establish his own version of the story.
But it gets into complicated areas. Should Wikipedia just take anything that an agent sends at face value? Isn't it possible that a person isn't the best source on biography (plenty of people have self-serving and inaccurate views on themselves). Wikipedia's general philosophy is to look at what reliable sources say and summarize them rather than trying to make judgements about who is right and wrong and I think the resolution of citing both sources and letting readers decide was reasonable.
- Hm, you are right. Those lists can't be perfect and giving this a second look, I guess my comment was hasty. For the choices I thought weird I can mostly see the justification when researching the titles a bit more (and partly by checking for their names in my language -> properly identifying them).
For what it's worth and what mostly triggered my comment, I expected 1984 to be on the list but thought it missing, but as mentioned in the other comments I was wrong about that, it's just listed with the numbers written out. Le petit prince I wouldn't have wanted on the list, I know it's popular and french, but I never got the appeal. Ulysses, as mentioned below, surprised me as I thought it's only popular in some countries, and regardless of that I think its just not readable. I would kick out two of the Lord of the ring books, one is enough and it's not like each of them had a different impact.
Maybe even more subjective, The Hound of the Baskervilles is important and well known and everything, but does it really held up when you read it today? If not, which would be my opinion, should it be on the list regardless? And I'd consider replacing Thomas Mann Zauberberg with Tod in Venedig, just because I liked it a lot.
For missing books: Louis Begley is an author I felt to be missing, probably with Wartime lies, or About Schmidt. The first Harry Potter as well, but I understand that in 1999 it was too early for that judgement. Stephenson's Snow Crash is missing, maybe replaceable with Neuromancer to have something of that genre. Talking german literature with Thomas Mann above, Alfred Andersch Die Rote would have a place on my personal list, as well as Die Wand by Marlen Haushofer. Haruki Murakami is missing, though maybe with 1Q84 he better fits into a list of the current century. Stephen King? Paul Auster? Philip Roth? Though maybe that would be for The Human Stain, and that's from 2000.
As an aside, I was happily surprised to see The Master and Margarita on the list. It's one of the more known books that I thought had a very special charm, but not one I'd expect to see working on many, as one would have to have read Goethe's Faust and liked it...
- It appears so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain
>Roth described in a 2012 piece for The New Yorker how his novel was inspired by an event in the life of his friend Melvin Tumin, a "professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years". Tumin was subject to a "witch hunt" but was ultimately found blameless in a matter involving use of allegedly racial language concerning two African American students.
...
>In the reviews of the book in both the daily and the Sunday New York Times in 2000, Kakutani and Lorrie Moore suggested that the central character of Coleman Silk might have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a well-known New York literary editor of the Times. Other writers in the academic and mainstream press made the same suggestion. After Broyard's death in 1990, it had been revealed that he racially passed during his many years employed as a critic at The New York Times. He was of Louisiana Creole ancestry. However, Roth himself has stated that he had not known of Broyard's ancestry when he started writing the book and only learned of it months later.
- One example that comes to my mind is when author Philip Roth attempted to clarify the inspiration for his book The Human Stain. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-...
The wikipedia entry for The Human Stain now contains a reference to the controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain#Anatole_Broyard...
- Interesting. His argument is that the article was only claiming that some other people thought Broyard's life was similar and he gives a link to a specific edit on Wikipedia, claiming the state of the article when Roth encountered it was only to say that some people thought the stories were similar, not that Roth was actually inspired:
> False. There was absolutely no misstatement in the article. What the article claimed at the time he wrote this open letter was that “Kakutani and other critics were struck by the parallels to the life of Anatole Broyard, a writer and the New York Times literary critic in the 1950s and 1960s who was of Louisiana Creole mixed-race descent and passed for white”.
He uses this edit to claim Roth is either mentally incompetent ("aggrieved and confused ramblings") or lying ("a malicious act").
However, this claim by quominus/Oliver is a misdirection. Looking through the edit history, that cited edit clearly happened after Roth's biographer attempted to correct the article, a fact which Oliver certainly was aware. The article when Roth saw it read:
> Salon.com critic Charles Taylor argues that Roth had to have been at least partly inspired by the case of Anatole Broyard, a literary critic who, like the protagonist of ''The Human Stain'', was a man identified as Creole who spent his entire professional life more-or-less as white. Roth states there is no connection, as he did not know Broyard had any black ancestry until an article published months after he had started writing his novel.
This citation is very different. Here, saying "Roth had to have been at least partly inspired" clearly puts for the supposition that Roth did partly base the novel on Broyard, whereas the later edit only says that some people saw parallels.
- > What part of it did you not find compelling?
The parts where it was 1. unnecessarily vitriolic, 2. self-important, and where it 3. prioritized strict, literal interpretation over common sense. I'll take these in order, although the most important point is probably the last one.
1. Philip Roth is going on 80 years old. It's not reasonable to expect him, or anyone else really, to fully grasp the ins and outs of Wikipedia. And let's face it, there's plenty about Wikipedia to criticize, as HNers often do. You don't get to institute byzantine editorial policies and then condemn people who work around them. There's more than a hint of the Kafkaesque to Wikipedia's "official channels."
2. Wikipedia is cool, and the veracity problem is a hard one, but there's no excuse for punting on it. He's "not convinced that there’s a solution to this problem"[1]? I don't care. Try anyway. People get way too defensive about this stuff when they should be channeling their inner Josiah Bartlet: "we can do better, and we must do better, and we will do better, and we will start this moment today."
3. Finally -- and a better example of le mot juste I've not seen in a while -- a central plot element of The Human Stain is the power of allegation, even when false. The line Roth objected to was about the alleged inspiration for his character. Note, as Andreas Kolbe does in the first comment to Oliver's blog, that this comment was filed under Roth's bio page, where it really had no place, and not, as Oliver's blog examines, the page of The Human Stain itself, where a broader overview of critical reaction to the book makes sense. So if we're picking nits, Roth was actually right, and Oliver was shifting the goalposts, a common informal fallacy.
[1] That's from his follow-up post: http://quominus.org/archives/981
