Appearance in Other Works
- The opening of the book was the inspiration for San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst in English writing. The contest includes a "Dark and Stormy night" section, which is intended to find the worst introduction that can be made from the beginning of that sentence. The competition highlights literary achievements of the most dubious sort; "We want writers with a little talent but no taste," says San Jose State English Professor Scott Rice.
- The line was also frequently parodied in Charles Schulz' Peanuts comic strip by showing Snoopy repeatedly starting a novel that starts with the first part of the opening sentence.
- The science fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle also borrows, in a somewhat subversive manner, the opening line.
- In the book Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. recounts with enthusiasm his reading of Paul Clifford while at sea off the California coast.
- It is also referenced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Royale". The book the episode revolves around starts with the opening line.
Read more about this topic: Paul Clifford
Famous quotes containing the words appearance and/or works:
“To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the State.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
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