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Constructor: Amanda Rafkin and Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: E-READER (38A: Kindle, e.g. ... or a hint to this puzzle's theme?) — author puns where one word in a familiar phrase is changed to an author's name by the simple addition of an "E":

Theme answers:

• CRYING WOLFE (17A: Clamoring for "The Bonfire of the Vanities"?)
• WILDE PITCH (24A: Selling someone on "The Importance of Being Earnest"?)
• TOOLE CHEST (50A: Spot to store "A Confederacy of Dunces"?)
• PEACHY KEENE (62A: Positive review of a Nancy Drew mystery?)

Word of the Day: John Kennedy Toole (50A) —

John Kennedy Toole (/ˈtuːl/; December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected during his lifetime. After suffering from paranoia and depression due in part to these failures, he died by suicide at the age of 31. [...] Dunces is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who lives at home with his mother. It is hailed for its accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole based Reilly in part on his college professor friend Bob Byrne. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial, and Reilly mirrored him in these respects. The character was also based on Toole himself, and several personal experiences served as inspiration for passages in the novel. While at Tulane, Toole filled in for a friend at a job as a hot tamale cart vendor, and worked at a family owned and operated clothing factory. Both of these experiences were later adopted into his fiction. /// Toole submitted Dunces to publisher Simon & Schuster, where it reached editor Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb considered Toole talented but felt his comic novel was essentially pointless. Despite several revisions, Gottlieb remained unsatisfied, and after the book was rejected by another literary figure, Hodding Carter Jr., Toole shelved the novel. Suffering from depression and feelings of persecution, Toole left home on a journey around the country. He stopped in Biloxi, Mississippi, to end his life [...]. Some years later, his mother brought the manuscript of Dunces to the attention of novelist Walker Percy, who ushered the book into print. In 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (wikipedia)

• • •

This started out looking like it was just going to be a bunch of mildly cringey author puns, which I guess it is, at its core, but those puns end up having a consistency that tightens and elevates things above mere punniness. Wow, that is an awful-looking word, "punniness"—shades of "puniness" but also "penis" and "piss" and "pus." Sorry, good morning, let's start over. Punniness! There's one crucial problem with the theme and that's the revealer—this theme is about E-writers. I, you, we are the E-READERs, is that it? The clue should have at least tried to make sense of how the revealer is supposed to make sense, exactly. Revealer clues really matter, and everyone just bailed out on this one. "A hint to this puzzle's theme?" Well, I guess, yeah, but come on, say more? Give me some of that clever punniness you seem to like so much. The author set is solid; I wonder about the longevity of John Kennedy Toole's fame. He basically has the one famous book. He died the year I was born, so we're going *back* now. Do adolescents and young adults still get that book pressed on them by their parents? That's what happened to me when I was a teenager (I haven't read it since). He had such a strange, sad, short career (see "Word of the Day," above). Anyway, he stands out today as the one writer with by far the least substantial career. The others were prolific, iconic even. If nothing else, this puzzle taught me a way to remember how to spell Carolyn KEENE (not KEANE)'s name—it's the real word ("keen") + E. She's PEACHY KEENE! Such a useful mnemonic. 

Before the theme became completely evident, things didn't look so great. CRYING WOLFE is kind of a shrug of a pun, and the fill up there wasn't exactly promising (REW ETAIL ESL AAA etc.):

But as I say, the theme smartened up, and the fill did even out a bit. GAWKER and EXTROVERT and PET PIG give the puzzle a cool weird energy (the energy of an EXTROVERT with a PET PIG reading GAWKER on her phone at an outdoor cafe in Manhattan circa 2013, I guess), and I really like the way USVSTHEM looks in the grid ([GAWKER reader looks up from phone]: "It's US VS THEM, pig!" "Oink!"). I had trouble getting started in the NW, where OFFS, "FARGO" and FRYER all had clues I couldn't get my head around, and where (ugh) END was the back END of a cross-reference that started somewhere way down at the bottom of the grid (61A: With 14-Down, what "Fin" might mean). The upside-down cross-ref is the worst. Like, I just started, please don't make me go searching the grid for the front end of this clue just so I can get a stupid 3-letter word, please! Weirdly, the only other part of the grid that gave me similar trouble was the NW's symmetrical counterpart, where I wrote in "HOLD UP!" at 59A: "Now wait just a second!" ("HOLD IT!"), which Really affected my ability to make sense of the crosses on those two wrong letters. Also, despite my Ph.D., my job, my frequent teaching of prosody, I had trouble getting to FEET from 69A: Units of poetry. I, like every other rube, probably, was thinking of more substantial units (lines, stanzas, etc.). But no, we're down to the atomic level here with the metrical units themselves, the FEET. An IAMB is a foot. So is a TROCHEE, a SPONDEE, a DACTYL, an ANAPEST (feel free to add allllll of these to your wordlists, constructors). Anyway, sometimes the puzzle throws you a softball and you still absolutely whiff. Ah well.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

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