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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Leonard Merrick
ISBN# 9780838642504
Reviewed by: Kathleen McCormack
Philological Quarterly, Vol 88, Issue 4 |
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The novels, short stories, dramas, and screenplays of Leonard Merrick, described in laboriously thorough detail by William Baker and Jeanette Shumaker in Leonard Merrick: A Forgotten Novelist's Novelist, provide one resource for continued creativity. ... The brief introductions that begin the chapters mention a distinctive feature about each work, which provides the option to move on to the longer summaries, analysis, reception history, and literary historical contexts that might suggest a novel or short story as a possible addition to a theme or period course, or, because of Merrick's specialty in outsider characters, a desirable item for minority-literature syllabus.
In addition to the features that make this book a rich resource for teaching, the reception history segments also carry independent interest about such authors as J.M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, and Virginia Woolf, who reveal in their comments on Merrick's work several expressions of eye-catching bluntness.
Forgotten Novelist's Novelist succeeds in its goal: to spark interest among the uninitiated in the author and in the novel, as well as in the short stories that are "wry fables or spoofs of romanticism," and to provoke interest in an overlooked author who deserves more attention and has much to offer in the classroom.
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