Free Republic

A critically acclaimed young adult author has been “canceled” and dropped by her agent after vociferously defending classic books in a Twitter-fueled rage. Jessica Cluess, the author of the popular “Kingdom of Fire” series (among others) picked a fight with an anti-racist and anti-bias educator Lorena Germán who founded the #DisruptTexts movement which aims to get more works by people of color into schools and to look critically at works by famous white “classic” authors. “Did y’all know that many of the ‘classics’ were written before the 50s? Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this...

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss. Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived...

In his little book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, published many years ago, Henry James has the following significant sentences: “The charm [of Hawthorne’s slighter pieces of fiction] is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mystery of man’s soul and conscience. They are moral, and their interest is moral; they deal with something more than the mere accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it.” The interest of this passage lies...

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter" and other classics of American letters, left more than a literary legacy. His daughter Rose, a convert to Catholicism, founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who have provided free care to poor cancer patients for more than 100 years. Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, had a deeply happy and loving marriage but were separated in death. Nathaniel Hawthorne was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass., the town where the Hawthorne family had lived for some years. The widowed Sophia Hawthorne and the couple's three children moved to...

It was a Hawthorne family reunion, for the dead and the living. About 40 descendants of Nathaniel Hawthorne gathered in Concord on Monday to watch as the remains of his wife and daughter, buried for more than a century in England, were interred in the family plot at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery alongside the author. "It's greatly significant to see the family reunited," said Alison Hawthorne Deming, 59, of Tucson, Ariz., Hawthorne's great-great-grandaughter. "It's also great to get together different parts of the heritage. It's a beautiful celebration for us," said Deming, a professor of creative writing at the University...