High School from Hell

by Dennis Littrell

Roland Flaubert was a gifted teacher who inspired his students. "In poetry is found the true power of the language," he would tell them. "We see this especially in writers like Shakespeare where words are ripped from their moorings and made to soar..." He wanted so much for them to understand that the ideas in Siddhartha, for a different example, were profound and noble. He said, "You could listen to the river, and if you listened with all your heart and soul, you could hear every sound and know the heart of every creature, great and small, and see that they are all the same... "This is an idea of literature and it is an idea of religion. We are all equal in the eyes of God." But perhaps he inspired them too much. Perhaps he was a man careless in his affections. He was a teacher who loved his students; otherwise how could he be a teacher of other people's children? But again, perhaps he loved them too much. People who know me will see elements of memoir in "High School from Hell," and they would be correct since I too was for a time in my life a teacher in the public schools. There are in the novel events that are similar to events that I experienced or observed; and there are people in the novel similar to, or composites of people I have known or heard about. However all the events in the novel are fictions as are all the people. To paraphrase Picasso, fiction is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 24, 2011

About the author

I've been a soldier, a newspaper reporter, a high school English teacher, a day trader and a poker professional. I've written literally millions of words in my career as a writer, and think of myself primarily as a writer. My work has appeared in popular publications like Playboy and Smoke magazines and in literary journals where it has won some minor awards. My novel A Perfectly Natural Act gained royalty publication from G.P. Putnam's in 1973 and was brought out in paperback the following year by Pinnacle. First Artists was considering an option on it when they went defunct. The novel would make a rather good movie. (Maybe I'll write the screenplay one of these days.) Additionally, I've written over fifteen hundred reviews (over a million words in all!) for various Web sites, most notably Amazon and the Internet Movie Database. Some of my reviews are among the best appearing anywhere (or so I have been told). Over the years I've also written about a dozen book-length manuscripts. My project now is to present perhaps eight to ten of these manuscripts before the public in book form. I was graduated from UCLA in 1969 with a major in Political Science and minor in English Literature.