Daily puzzles/problems.

[Basil]

Sorry, Gilliatt, I should have been more precise when laying out the quiz: these quotes refer to actual writers, not literary characters. The word author would have been a much better choice than the slightly murky term literary figure.

I don't actually own any firearms, but I am the assigned armorer for my unit--I could possibly get my hands on the Ma Deuce.

[Basil]

I'll repost the list, since we've carried over a page:

1. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Ernest Hemingway
2. "He was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Milton
3. "About eight years or so ago, Valentine's Day, I seem to remember, you received an extremely bad review…and this review, unlike most bad reviews, came accompanied with a very large advance."
4. "What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event."
5. "Explaining metaphysics to the nation –
   I wish he would explain his Explanation."
6. "Count No 'Count"
7. "Before [him] there had only been good and bad characters, deliverers and traitors, saints and blasphemers, in literature; here the hero is saint and fool in one and the same person."
8. "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop [sir], back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." John Keats
9. "Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks." Joel Chandler Harris
10. "A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." Percy Shelley
11. "[He] was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry." Edgar Allan Poe
12. "[He] did a great many notable things for his country…it is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel."

[MarkBastable]

2. Byron

[prendrelemick]

I was thinking Byron for number 10. "Ineffectual Angel" is ringing bells somewhere in my head and putting me in mind of those Romantic poets Coleridge-Keats-Shelly-Blake-Byron.

IF Byron is number 2, and as he was mad bad and dangerous to know it is likely, and Keats has already gone, and Blake was no Angel of any kind, then Shelly for number 10.

[prendrelemick]

Sorry I blew up like that, Mick; I'm very sensitive about my Georgian heritage, particularly our origins as a debtor's colony.

Phew, (Takes off Kevlar boiler suit.) I'm a Yorkshireman - I understand. Here in Merry Old England, Georgian refers to a period, rather than a place.

[Basil]

Number 2 isn't Byron, but Shelley is correct for 10.

[prendrelemick]

7. Could be refering to Gatsby, so Scott Fitzgerald ?

[Basil]

Not Fitzgerald. The first few words of that clue are key.

[prendrelemick]

2. Milton.

[MarkBastable]

Not Fitzgerald. The first few words of that clue are key.

Dostoevsky?

[MarkBastable]

Incidentally, I'm very interested in the answer to number 4, as that's a pretty accurate summary of what my writing increasingly attempts to achieve.

[Basil]

2. Milton.

Correct.

Dostoevsky?

Incorrect. I've changed my mind--it's the last phrase of that quote that is key, not the beginning.

[Basil]

I'm really hoping someone will figure out #3. It helps if you realize the speaker is using the terms "bad review" and "advance" rather ironically.

[hawthorns]

4. Faulkner?

[prendrelemick]

I'm now resorting to listing the usual suspects, and see if any quote fits.

Herman Melville, possible no. 5
Henry James,
Joseph Heller
james joyce
J D Salinger
John Stienbeck
Stephen King, possible no. 3

7. Ahh, is that Don Quixote? - Cervantes