Episode 24: Deals with the Devil (with Ed Simon) and Firing Holden Caulfield

We’re going to Hell with literary man-about-town Ed Simon, founder of the Pittsburgh Review of Books (with which our podcast is affiliated) and author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain. Ed helps us figure out why the legend of Faust still feels fresh in our world today, where nobody ever makes short-sighted deals that turn out badly in the end.   Then, we put Catcher in the Rye on trial. Does it deserve its vaunted position in the high school curriculum? And what do we want high schoolers reading, anyway, you big phony?   Ed Simon has several books out now.   Works cited this episode:   “Hypergraphia: On Prolific Writers and the Persistent Need to Produce,” Ed Simon, LitHub “The New Fabio is Claude,” The New York Times The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe “Bart Sells His Soul,” The Simpsons Hellraiser, dir. Clive Barker Morphology of the Folk Tale, Vladimir Propp “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” Charlie Daniels Band “Theophilus,” The Book of Drama, Hrotsvitha On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy D. Snyder “High School English and the Making of American Readers,” Alexander Manshel, American Literary History The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger “Texts Most Frequently Taught in U.S. Secondary Classrooms are Nearly Identical to List from Decades Ago,” National Council of Teachers of English Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald The Crucible, Arthur Miller Macbeth, William Shakespeare Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee Night, Elie Wiesel Hamlet, William Shakespeare Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury Frankenstein, Mary Shelley King Dork, Frank Portman The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton 1984, George Orwell Brave New World, Aldous Huxley Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare