Fairy Tales and After by Roger Sale

Fairy Tales and After by Roger Sale

Roger Sale invites us to discover anew some of the great works of children's literature, works that have been read and loved but seldom given the benefit of serious literary assessment. It takes a critic of special gifts--receptiveness, discrimination, clarity of perception, independence of judgment--to discuss these books as illuminatingly as Sale does.

This is not a survey but a very personal book: Sale writes about stories and books with which he feels an imaginative sympathy. As it happens, they include a great many of the classic children's texts, works as disparate as Beauty and the Beast and Alice, The Wind in the Willows and Babar, The Snow Queen and Peter Rabbit, the Jungle Book and the Oz books. He conveys a fresh sense of what is special and memorable about each of them.

While avoiding conventional literary history, he sketches the circumstances of the author's life when they provide insight into the works. Unlike Bettelheim and others, Sale is not concerned with the uses of children's literature. He writes for adults, with the conviction that adults can find delight in these books. Many already do, and perhaps with his stimulus, many more will.

Roger Sale (1932-2017) came to Seattle in 1962 to teach at the University of Washington, where he was a literature professor for nearly forty years. A prolific writer for publications such as the New York Review of Books and Seattle Weekly, Sale was the author of thirteen books, including Modern Heroism: Essays on D. H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J. R. R. Tolkien; Fairy Tales and After; On Writing; and Seeing Seattle. Host of Mossback's Northwest on KCTS9, Knute Berger is an award-winning columnist for Crosscut and Seattle magazine and author of two books: Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps, and the Myth of Seattle Nice and Space Needle: The Spirit of Seattle.