Columns Columns Allyn Hunt Books, Bibles weave a far-reaching continuum of encounters, imagination and revelations in startling ways both simple and intricate
Books, Bibles weave a far-reaching continuum of encounters, imagination and revelations in startling ways both simple and intricate
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- Published on Friday, 21 December 2012 12:32
- Written by Allyn Hunt
“The book of books” is a newly re-discovered monicker for the Bible. A lit instructor, in the early 1950s, a gaunt, knowing World War II vet, enthusiastically parsing John Steinbeck’s rightfully famed “Grapes of Wrath” for a class of unread, if eager students, used the term referring to the King James Bible.
When surely the poorest read of these students asked about this after class, the instructor glanced up from his burgeoning briefcase with an assessing, faint grin. “Do you know Steinbeck’s work?”
“Well, in our family my mother was the reader of ... I guess you’d call it serious fiction.”
“No,” he said with a smile. “I’d call it literature. Did you look at anything she was reading?”
“Yes. A book with drawings by John Groth, the magazine artist. It was a Hemingway book of short stories called ‘Men Without Women,’”
“Great stuff in that collection.”