Tuesday, April 5, 2011

A very long sentence

In his book, "A Plot Against America," Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth crafts a very long, nay gravity-defying, sentence. Astonishingly, not only is the sentence not a run-on but the whole enchilada is grammatically correct, at least by my lights. Kids, don't try this at home:
“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark, dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard her complain of having been pointedly ill-treated in Elizabeth as a girl, it was not until she married and moved to Newark’s new Jewish neighborhood that she discovered the confidence that led her to become first a PTA “grade mother,” then a PTA vice president in charge of establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and finally the PTA president, who, after attending a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis, proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on January 30 – President Roosevelt’s birthday – that was accepted by most schools.”
Bravo. Though less is usually more, sometimes more is more.

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