|
Back when I was in high school, I ran into an omnibus of Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories in the school library. At the time I enjoyed the book being a bit young to be offended by some of the content. A few years later, I was discussing the book with one of my teachers after I referred to it in an essay and she was appalled by the racism. Her opinion was that while it was a reflection of the times (pre-WWI midwestern America) and that racism was part of the zeitgeist of the times but that I should not have mentioned such a disagreeable topic in my essay. This was during a rather violent era for the civil rights movement in the USA with Martin Luther King's assassination about 18 months in the future.
On a brighter note, I still enjoy the Jeeves stories despite Bertie being, pretty much, the stereotype of the mindless nobleman.
|