Virginia Woolf is among the authors accused of anti-Semitism

THE LIST of famous authors accused of anti-Semitism at some point, either while living or dead, is quite long — so long in fact that one wonders if the whole literature racket shouldn’t be shut down, along perhaps with reading itself. Goodbye to The Great Gatsby, The Merchant of Venice, Oliver Twist and The Canterbury Tales. Anything short of a completely flattering portrayal of Jewish characters is enough to land an author in this gallery of rogues. Even Jewish authors have not escaped the charge. American author Philip Roth was accused of anti-Semitism for his negative portrayals of Jewish characters in his novels.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I did some random searches of well-known authors on the Internet and all of them except for E.B. White came up guilty. (I wasn’t surprised to find another New Yorker, the sassy Dorothy Parker, was among the charged.) It was a relief at least to know Stuart Little isn’t yet accused of being a Nazi. But I wonder about him ….  well, he was at least a white supremacist, I’d say, because of the lack of diversity in his environment and the natty way he dressed. The oldest surviving work of French literature, La Chanson de Roland, did not come up clean.

I found additional compilations (see sources below). Below are some of the literary deadbeats who, by today’s standards, belong behind bars. For Hypersensitive Hebrews, the canon of Western literature is similar to one of those shooting booths at a country fair. A figure pops up and — crack! — you try to shoot it down. It’s a sport, in a way. Contrary to what these sharpshooters believe, we cannot peer into the hearts of other human beings. But if we could, I’d be willing to bet we wouldn’t find an ounce of true hatred in any of these famous targets.

William Shakespeare
Geoffrey Chaucer
Christopher Marlowe
Charles Dickens
G.K. Chesterton
T.S. Eliot
Dante
W.B. Yeats
Mark Twain
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Balzac
George Sand
Flannery O’Connor
Frank Norris
Theodore Dreiser
Ernest Hemingway
Celine
Henry Adams
George Eliot
George du Maurier
James Joyce
Virginia Woolf
Graham Greene
Evelyn Waugh
E.E. Cummings
Henry Miller
Dorothy Parker
Byron Scott
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Henry James
Dostoyevsky
Trollope
Thomas Wolfe
Voltaire
Peter Abelard
Ezra Pound
Anthony Trollope
Emile Zola
Guy de Maupassant
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
William Cullen Bryant
Oliver Wendell Holmes
H.L. Mencken
Katherine Ann Porter
Gore Vidal
Truman Capote
Richard Kostelanetz
John Cheever
Edith Wharton
Willa Cather
Jack London
William Faulkner
Philip Roth
William Styron
Baudelaire
Thomas Mann
William Blake
George Orwell
J.R. Tolkien
Rita Mae Brown
Mother Goose
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Ivan Turgenev

(Sources: here and here)

— Comments —

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

When I was growing up in Ethiopia, my mother would borrow books for me from the British Council’s library (which still exists). Or I would choose my own books from the English School’s library in Addis Ababa, where my parents sent me to be educated.

By the time we went in exile to Paris, when I was nine, I’m sure I had read all the Noddy and The Famous Five series of books by Enid Blyton.

I must have been formed into a Racist, Homophobic, Nazi Sympathizer by this formidable author, accused of anti-Semitism, who kept me entertained and alert during my juvenile years in Ethiopia.

Laura writes:

That reminds me, I forgot to include Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

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