BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Editors of The New York Times Book Review, 1896-2017: Why have so few of them written novels or poems? Has Times been prejudiced against fiction writers?

After my previous post—which contrasted the cognitive styles of Pamela Paul, Book Review Editor, and Nicole Lamy, the Match Book columnist—I wondered if past Editors had been like Pamela Paul, nonfiction writers.

As the following list indicates, of the nineteen Editors since The New York Times Book Review became a separate section in 1896, I could find only two, John Leonard and Harvey Shapiro, who had published novels or poems:

  1. Francis Whiting Halsey (1896-1902)
 2. Edward Augustus Dithmar (1902-1907)
 3. John Grant Dater (1907-1910)
 4. Joseph Benson Gilder (1910-1911)
 5. George Buchanan Fife (1911-1912)
 6. Louis H.[?] Wetmore (1912-1913)
 7. Clifford Smyth (1913-1922)
 8. Brooks Atkinson (1922-1925)
 9. J. (James) Donald Adams (1925-1943)
10. Robert Van Gelder (1944-1946)
11. John K. Hutchens (1946-1948)
12. (Ernest) Francis Brown (1949-1971)
13. John Leonard (1971-1975) (novels)
14. Harvey Shapiro (1975-1983) (poems)
15. Mitchel R. Levitas (1983-1989)
16. Rebecca Pepper Sinkler (1989-1995)
17. Charles McGrath (1995-2004)
18. Sam Tanenhaus (2004-2013)
19. Pamela Paul (2013-present)

So I wonder if those who have chosen Editors for The New York Times Book Review have been prejudiced against fiction writers. And if so, I wonder on what that prejudice is based: on the way fiction writers, in contrast to nonfiction writers, think?
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