The Washington Post, October 5th, 2003
Samuel Butler is the great contrarian of English literature. His parents raised him in a way that he came to believe was exactly backward -- pouring on threats and deprivations, holding back affection -- and he proved himself to be very much their son when he built a writing career on his habit of seeing the world inside-out. In his speculative satire Erewhon, illness is a punishable offense, while crime gets treated by physicians. One of many apercus in his posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) brands the old, not the young, as neophytes, for they are involved in a complex process -- a...
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