Emerson had pointed to the danger of sharing your most intimate thoughts in what you believed to be the most beautiful of words with anyone else, seeking their approval, only to have this “treasure” treated as of no consequence. And true enough, in my own experience as a writer and author this is a quick way to lose a friend by telling them honestly what you think of their writing. What people are usually seeking is approval, not honest criticism. Many times I have refused to read something from friends asking “What do you think of this?” I refer them to the many services provided writers where an objective evaluation of their writing can be had for a fee. I may still lose a friend, but this remains sound counsel for those that want an honest and objective opinion of their work.

But writing in America throughout has fallen on hard times, as anyone truly literate in the great works of literature knows. It is with justification I have said mine is the last generation of the great writers of America.

My having been raised with the great literature of Western Civilization and like Harper Lee among natural story tellers of a past generation, primarily southerners of the Dust Bowl migration, it seems natural I would become a writer and author. But as a teacher I found my background in story telling played an important role; there was hardly a situation I had to deal with concerning my classes some story would come to mind to make and emphasize a point. Perhaps some of this skill in story telling is in my genes from my Cherokee ancestors as well. Much as the most ancient of poets, my Indian ancestors cultivated their story tellers, their poets, and honored them because this was how those things of greatest importance were passed on from generation to generation.

By the time I began attending college, I came face to face with the facts of Harper Lee’s criticism of the universities no longer teaching writing. I became intimately acquainted with the truth of her criticism, and have written much about this, including my critique of Ms. Lee’s literary masterpiece considered by some including me “the novel of the century” in which I elaborate somewhat on her reasons for never writing again. But in sum, “To Kill A Mockingbird” might well be considered the epitaph for writing in America. One commentator reflecting my own thought believed Ms. Lee considered trying any further to advance writing in America would only be “spitting into the wind.”

In the only interview Harper Lee gave in 1964 she stated in respect to writing: “There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be... We really have no tradition of criticism. (Here we go, back to tradition.) The thing that has made it worse is the mass media—television, radio—that dominate time with less than a full creative effort. Reading gets confined to a quick grab for the latest best seller as the commuter dashes for the train. I think the American public is the worst-informed public in the world about its own literature. We have few journals that begin to compare with English periodicals like The Spectator and The Economist. But then, books are published in England in a more leisurely fashion, and the judgments on them are better simply for that. In general, American criticism is in a very poor state, and I think it always will be...

Ray Bradbury recently emphasizing his novel “Fahrenheit 451” was not about censorship, but expressed his concern about TV supplanting reading and writing, the danger TV posed to a literary class in America anticipated Harper Lee’s own concerns. The further death knell emphasizing my comment about Harper Lee’s epitaph “There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence” has been the rampant political correctness that has betrayed the beauty of the English language to Bush and other lovers of slave labor in America touting Spanish, as though this were equal in any way to the language of Shakespeare and the great works of literature in English. Merely quoting Ms. Lee’s comment now is to open yourself to the howls of “racism!” by those with an agenda of denigrating the language of Shakespeare and all great writers of the English language and opposing making English our national language by law.

The utterly inane shallowness of the media including that of the news in both print and TV with a fixation on celebrity, the sheer lack of writing skills evidencing a lack of love for language on the part of newspaper columnists throughout is a reflection of Ray Bradbury and Harper Lee’s concern and criticism. That there has not been a novel the equal of TKM since is commentary enough to prove the point.

Affectation, pretentiousness, these will never take the place of having mastered the discipline of writing, the ability to convey complex thoughts in written expression with the intention of communicating rather than seeking approval of your prose. The cautionary words of Sam Clemens, Faulkner, Lewis, and Harper Lee continue to hold true in respect to writing. Refusing these eventually the greatness that was once the English language became merely tawdry, in too many cases trash reflecting Thoreau’s criticism “... a cloth-o’-silver sl-t, To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.” Only now it is the English language itself that has been made to serve the cause of slavery, no longer the language of freedom and the most noble thoughts of men and women finding expression, but fallen to “a cloth-o’-silver sl-t” pretending to be other than what it is in fact, too often pretense and affectation in lieu of the real love and mastery of the English language.