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Once Again to Zelda
Marlene Wagman-Geller
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Non Fiction
Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature’s Most Intriguing Dedications
Marlene Wagman-Geller
Readers are curious people. Like boys who collect baseball cards and girls who fill their rooms with dolls, they see more in books than others.
Marlene Wagman-Geller took her interest in book dedications to the point of actual obsession — she researched the dedications of 50 novels. And, out of that, she made a book, Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature’s Most Intriguing Dedications. [Hers is dedicated to her husband and daughter — not grounds for another profile.]
If, like me, you are curious but lazy about tracking down trivia, this book’s mini-essay offer compressed biographies that hit the high points and not much more. That’s really all most readers want. But there are just enough tidbits to deliver surprise after surprise to this onetime Lit major. Like:
Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë dedicated “Jane Eyre” to William Thackeray, whose butler found him weeping as he read.
Herman Melville: The author of “Moby Dick” seems to have had a crush on Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Mark Twain: I never knew how devoted he was to his wife. Or that he smoked 40 cigars a day.
L. Frank Baum: Please thank his wife for “Oz”.
Oscar Wilde: He fell in love with the wrong man. (Woman can identify.)
Margaret Mitchell: There was more than one “Rhett Butler” in her life.
Ayn Rand: By her coffin was a 6” high floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: He really did have to wait 14 years to marry Mercedes.
I do need to warn you: An editor is thanked, but that doesn’t mean the book was edited. Almost every profile ends with a “button”, a horrific device, favored by amateurs, that sums everything up in a phrase you’ve seen earlier in the piece. And the dead are always reunited with loved ones in some goopy beyond. You will very quickly decide, as I did, that the way to keep your blood from boiling is simply to skip the last paragraph of every profile.
Zelda would.
To buy “Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature’s Most Intriguing Dedications” from Amazon.com, click here.
