Talk:Max Eastman

Errors in quotation of Joyce
This says that Joyce's famous "to keep the critics busy for three hundred years" comment was in response to Eastman and footnotes Eastman's article in Harper's, "The Cult of Unintelligibility." I tracked down and read that article, and, while Eastman does name Joyce as part of that titular cult, Joyce does not say anything in that article--it isn't an interview--and Eastman doesn't report him saying so. I googled Joyce's famous phrase, and unsurprisingly, Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce was the first hit to come up. I checked the index and footnotes pertaining to Eastman, and, as far as I can tell, there are two problems. 1) Eastman reported a conversation with Joyce in The Literary Mind, and not the article in Harper's. 2) More importantly, the attribution of the quotes is mixed up. The "three hundred years" quote is from an interview with Jacob Schwartz, whereas Eastman, in The Literary Mind, reports another well-known gem, where Joyce says that his ideal reader is someone who spends all of his time reading Joyce.

I'll give it a week or two to see if anyone wants to check my work, but, if I don't hear from anyone, I'm going to edit this text out. 128.252.163.67 (talk) 20:14, 4 February 2014 (UTC)MOB


 * Good for you for going back to the sources! Thanks for your hard work. I agree with your recommendation to delete in incorrect text.Parkwells (talk) 23:23, 4 February 2014 (UTC)