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Madeleine l'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / THE LOVE OF LANGUAGE: SCHOLARS WRITE ABOUT OPENING SENTENCES |
| Author: Anne Carson Daly |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1995 |
| Size: 771 Words, 4,753 Characters |
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Although almost everyone recognizes "It was a dark and stormy night" as a famous opening line, virtually no one remembers the Victorian author, Bulwer-Lytton, who first popularized it in his little-known novel, Paul Clifford (1830). Derided today as a master of purple prose, Lytton lives on--infamously--in an annual contest named after him in which would-be authors vie to create the worst opening sentence of a novel. Fittingly, the first collection of such winning lines is entitled--what else?--"It Was a Dark and Stormy Night."
This is also the line that Snoopy, the literary dog in th...
. . .
...ological circumstances, character will dictate plot, and the conflict between good and evil will take center stage.
Far from being an appropriate entry in the Bulwer-Lytton contest, "It was a dark and stormy night" gives the reader a remarkably rich and efficient set of operating instructions for maneuvering a particular kind of magic carpet on a complex and delightful imaginative journey.
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