Novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist – The Published Reporter®

NEW YORK, NY – Since I was a child, I have loved literature and philosophy. When I was young there were always books galore in the house and my mother was an English teacher and librarian; my father was a lawyer and author of a classic legal text “Contested paternity procedure”. My two sisters have advanced degrees in classical music, classical languages, Greek and Latin, and one sister has a doctorate in theology. Since my earliest childhood, I have loved and had a life of learning. English Literature has been and is my first love which has always been a part of me from the beginning of my life, as well as the many years of study in classical languages, Greek and Latin and also Hebrew, from high school. in college, and ending in three of the graduate years where I focused on classics in college and graduate school, but also got to know and love Hebrew and the bible Hebrew; the Psalms; Genesis; and the book of Job. Since the beginning of my days, I have loved the great English writers such as Dickens, Donne, Milton, Conrad, Keats, Shelly, Byron, Browning, Tennyson, James, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and many more, some largely forgotten and no longer noticed or not read in the momentum of modernity and the current fashionable and politically correct world.

When I read these writers, first my mind and my mind are uplifted and; second, I am fascinated by the beauty of their style and the sounds and beauty of their verbal expressions or, perhaps better said, the vowel sounds of their words. The same is true of the great thinkers of the past such as William james, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand russell, whose thought challenges me and emboldens me to think more deeply and with more care and concern for their thoughts and the expression of those thoughts. For my classical education I owe a great debt to the great classical writers such as Vergil, Livy, Horace, Catullus, Homer, Greek lyric poetry and tragedians such as Euripides.

Switching to an author that I love and love deeply may not be known to many people these days, but he was a very great novelist, one, I think, of the greatest. EM Forster (Edouard Morgan Forster) was born in England in 1879, attended the Tonbridge School like a boy, and continued to Royal College Cambridge where he later became a comrade. He made several trips to India. He recounted his experiences as he recalled them in his book “The longest trip.” At Tonbridge he wrote a number of books, one titled “A room with a view,” who analyzed and dissected an Italian tour of Lucy Honeychurch which is portrayed as stifled and inhibited by the restrictive conventions of Edwardian England. A similar theme is presented in his book “Where angels fear to walk” when a young English widow embarks on the grand tour and marries a penniless Italian on the way. The marriage fails and Lilia tragically dies, and the widow has a baby. Again the theme is visited by Mr. Forster in these previous books, including the book titled “A room with a view” and the others Forster writes about the cultural collision and the drought and sterility of the English middle class.

What I consider his greatest work, which no one who does not read these books has experienced fully and absolutely, although I am not entirely sure about this statement and opinion, is “Howard’s End.” Forster returns to earlier themes where he follows the relationship of the Wilcox family, former Landlord aristocrats whose only concern is their money and keeping it and raising it, and the Schlegel sisters, Helen and Margaret, cultured and liberal and educated. and attracted to art and artistry. EM Foster in this very great novel examines the tension and clash of materialism and greed with artistic sensibility and the novel examines the clash of art against commercial and monetary values. The novel examines the tension of class materialism with art and beauty; the book sets out to examine class tensions and their possible resolution.

Finally, EM Forster’s other ledger is “A passage in India”, which examines the clash between Western and Eastern culture during British rule in India through the prism of a rape charge. EM Forster is the most sensitive writer and through his most sensitive lens the reader is introduced to the dynamics of personal relationships.

For me, EM Forster is and always will be the greatest of English writers, and of all writers, since in the two books I have spoken of and mentioned here, one can see and understand the clash of cultures on the thinnest of intellectual surfaces and the clash of class relations and values. I don’t know if this continues to be a living problem, but his examination of social and personal relationships remains compelling and well deserves our understanding and consideration.

For those who wish, along with Mr. Forster, to go below the surface of the complexity of human relations, I recommend that you obtain and read these books, as well as “Two cheers for democracy” and “Harvest of Abinger”. They will change and transform you in their finest English language style, and change you in every way in mind, soul and person.