Another Great Hoax

The textbook before me, as I confronted my first class of Open Admissions students, was a thick one. It had been assigned me for a course in English composition; selflessly assembled for use by our chairman, it was a series of essays on “Cult Heroes of Our Time,” called Representative Men.

I soon learned that “Our Time” is not their time, though the book bore a 1970 copyright. There were essays on or by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Marshall McLuhan, J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol, Murray Gell-Mann, Jonas Salk and John Paul Getty—men of whom none of the students had ever heard. An Introduction confidently assured us that “Salinger is the one American writer whose works most students know intimately,” but none of mine knew of him at all. On the other hand, they did know something of other “representative men” (some of them women) represented, notably Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier, Elizabeth Taylor, Timothy Leary and Jacqueline Onassis.

GW

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Geoffrey Wagner

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The textbook before me, as I confronted my first class of Open Admissions students, was a thick one. It had been assigned me for a course in English composition; selflessly assembled for use by our chairman, it was a series of essays on “Cult Heroes of Our Time,” called Representative Men.

I soon learned that “Our Time” is not their time, though the book bore a 1970 copyright. There were essays on or by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Marshall McLuhan, J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol, Murray Gell-Mann, Jonas Salk and John Paul Getty—men of whom none of the students had ever heard. An Introduction confidently assured us that “Salinger is the one American writer whose works most students know intimately,” but none of mine knew of him at all. On the other hand, they did know something of other “representative men” (some of them women) represented, notably Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier, Elizabeth Taylor, Timothy Leary and Jacqueline Onassis.