Back to School Literature

Well it is again that time of year again when all students return to school and continue their education. It is with this in mind that I what to give everyone reading this a small lesson in classic literature. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, 1st Baron Lytton, was a very well known and well regarded poet, playwright, and novelist. He was born in 1803 and died in 1873. Very well renowned in his day, his novels now adays symbolize the overembellishment and extreme verbosity inherent in Victorian era prose. His most famous sentence was the line to the opening of his novel"Paul Clifford",

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

And in 1982, using the sheer weight and verbosity of this sentence, the English department of San Jose State University sponsored a small, whimsical literary contest entitled the Lytton-Bulwer Fiction Contest. The purpose was simple, "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels".

This year's winner was submitted by Garrison Spik of Washington D.C.,

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

It was with this gem that Mr. Spik won the vernable literature contest.


There are the other dishonorable mentions and runnersups that more than deserve their own spot in the literary limelight.