An open letter to Stephen Greenblatt, editor elect of The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Dear Professor Greenblatt,

The Harvard University website informs me that you are poised to assume the position of General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, becoming only the second general editor in the Norton's 43-year history. O frabjous day, indeed!

But before you become completely drunk with power as your iron grip on the Western Canon becomes almost total, I have a request. While you yet remain coherent, I ask you to consider a literary work for inclusion in the next edition. For too long, the great American writer Ernest Tidyman has been overlooked by America's scholars, and his texts are sorely under-represented in the classrooms of colleges and universities.

For a time, I assumed that this was due to the commercial popularity his character John Shaft enjoyed. But as any learned scholar knows, popular success does not always disqualify a work of serious literature. The popularity of Longfellow's poems was known to have made him rich in his day, and the Oprah-emulating breeders who made Toni Morrison a bestseller made her no less fit in the eyes of the Swedes.

Please Professor Greenblatt, consider, for inclusion in the Norton, Mr. Tidyman's masterwork, the apex of his art, that tome of tomes, that codex of codici: Shaft Among the Jews. I assure you, it is ripe for literary analysis!!!

For example, I imagine an entire Ph.D. thesis could be done on the relationship between William Shakespeare's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and Mr. Tidyman's diamond-coveting Simon Solomon. Likewise, Shaft Among the Jews' Enoch Belzer and Leopold Fischbein are a delightful pair in the spirit of Hamlet's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

And by the wounds of God!!! The greatest opening lines of any work of American Literature are STILL held to be "Call me Ishmael"??? Pish and posh! Consider the masterful opening paragraph employed by Tidyman as he commences his dazzling masterwork:

"Shaft regarded his office with sympathy, sadness, and some anger. The orange daybed shrieked all over the corner where it was supposed to wait quietly until he needed a place to crash. The bright blue carpeting was comitting violence from wall to wall as well as end to end of the color spectrum." - (c) 1972 Ernest Tidyman

Comitting violence indeed! Professor Greenblatt, you will be comitting violence of a literary sort if you fail to introduce this essentially American writer to the world!

I will await your updated edition with some anticipation.

- Johnskyn Kantilever