Children’s book authors have been doing well in the tournament, and here are two more. Don’t let the runaway bunny in the night kitchen, or the wild things might eat it up! I have no idea how either of these authors would be as a speaker, so please share your thoughts!
Past matchup
Jonathan writes:
It is not well enough known that Laura Ingalls Wilder and Malcolm X used to date. Yes, she was almost 60 years older than Malcolm, but that didn’t matter a bit to either of them. And why should it? They had managed to surpass the racial divide and the urban divide and they bonded over their early lives of struggle and resilience. Each of them wrote controversial autobiographical works with pronounced racial issues and with controversies over authorship. When Laura’s husband Almanzo died in 1949, she sought out the then-24-year-old Malcolm in prison. An intense relationship started, not consummated until Malcolm’s release from prison in 1952. Each of them sought comfort with the other, and they died only eight years apart, meeting whenever they could for the sort of love that only they understood.
I clearly need a seminar devoted to plausible fan fiction. Since Laura wrote more of her own autobiography than Malcolm did, I’m going with the writer.
Maybe the competition should be Alex Haley vs. Rose Wilder Lane. Hey, that’s a good idea for a category—ghostwriters!
Nick follows up:
Strangely enough, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane was both a noted libertarian and enamoured by what she saw as the radical individualism and liberty in Islam. She wrote a book, “The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority,” in 1943, which has a chapter which has been republished as a book , “Islam and the Discovery of Freedom.”
With relatively scant literature available on Islam in the English language in the mid-1900s, it is likely Malcolm X knew it.
+1 for Laura.
But the decider comes from this exchange:
Fishbone: Did Laura Ingalls Wilder ever have her photo taken while holding an M1 in one hand while peeking out the window at those who might wish to bring harm to him and his family? I think not. Game, set, match to Mr. el-Shabazz.
Dzhaughn: Pa would take him out pronto. Not saying that’s justified, but . . . Michael Landon.
I never watched the TV show so when I think of Pa, I don’t think of Landon, I think of the books, or maybe some of the illustrations in the books. Pa did seem pretty tough.
So Laura it is.
“Where the wild things are” is great but a bit of a boo hoo ending. The ending of it never happened or it did in dream or whatnot makes everything that happened so worthless. If Maurice Sendak has a poor ending to offer us, I would go with Margaret Wise Brown because her book “Goodnight moon”, ends in sleep, just as we should after a long seminar.
Doesn’t “Goodnight Moon” need a comma or three? What does it *mean* when she leave out those commas? With “Brown, Margaret Wise” vs. “Brown Margaret Wise” we have a paternalistic emphasis on the patronymic in the former against a strong suggestion of cannibalism in the latter. And, reallly, where do we stand on cannibalism? Soylent Green is People or the Authentic Paleo Diet? I’ll pass on both.
There also was the time I boughtlots of peanut butter cups for Halloween and there weren’t many trick-or-treaters. Maurices, Mo’ Probems. But over all a sweet memory.