#000584
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The Best (?) from the Bulwer-Lytton Contest
Compiled by Scott Rice
This is the first published harvest of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the tongue-in-cheek competition that San Jose State English professor Scott Rice founded in 1982, challenging entrants to write the worst possible opening sentence to an imaginary novel. The title salutes Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel *Paul Clifford* begins "It was a dark and stormy night," the phrase that became shorthand for overwrought prose. Rice gathers the champions and runners-up: sentences so gloriously bad—tangled metaphors, runaway subordinate clauses, groan-worthy puns—that they loop back around to delightful. It's a browser's book of literary comedy, perfect for dipping into, and a gentle education in exactly how not to write.
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The editor
Scott Rice, a professor of English at San Jose State University, launched the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in 1982 as a lark and found himself curating a durable comic institution. He edited the early anthologies that brought the contest's best-worst entries to a national readership.
The subject
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) was a hugely popular Victorian novelist and politician—coiner of "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "the great unwashed"—whose reputation has been unfairly reduced to the opening line of Paul Clifford. The contest is affectionate ribbing more than genuine scorn.
The book
The collection presents the winning sentences by category, each a miniature masterpiece of deliberate awfulness, often with the judges' wry commentary.
How it reads
The humor has aged well because bad writing is eternal; the entries still land. It's best sampled a few pages at a time rather than read straight through, and it doubles as a sly primer on the sins of overwriting.
For more context
Compare the ongoing contest (still run annually) and other literary-humor anthologies such as The Book of Heroic Failures.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Compiled by Scott Rice
- Publisher
- Penguin Books
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1984
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Colorado
Places