I've come to believe it won't happen in present times!

Lately, when I go through these threads, I am astonished at how POORLY folks express themselves!

Sometimes, when I want the reader to really make HIS/HER point, I am aghast that they simply cannot, what with:

No capitalization. No punctuation. Sentences that run on. Horrific, cryptic texting styles. Improper use of quotation marks (inability to discern what they are quoting, incorrect placement of the period, in or out of the quotation mark?). Just plain laziness. Typos. (Type, dammit, type!) At least proofread it before you send it. (That would be considerate of the person who might attempt to read it!) I could go on.

It just makes me want to send letter after letter correcting grammatical errors. I can live with the idea of your "personal style", I can! But when you fail to make your point because your style is so clearly UNEDUCATED, PLEASE just do the rest of us a favor, those of us who read these things for fun, and DON'T POST. One of these days I'm gonna just run a red pencil through letter after letter and we'll put you all on a blacklist of really horrible writers NOT TO READ! I mean, right now!

Great American Novel? Fat chance.

Some of Salon's writers are talented. Very talented, indeed. The rest of you need to revisit English 101. Some of you journalists, the AP Stylebook. There are rules about writing. Please.

Am I the only one? Okay. I've made my point. Thank you.

Why does it matter, the gender of the voice?

What is IMPORTANT is the experience of the voice in the Great American Novel. We read the story because it is worth reading.

We really couldn't care less about your sexual origins or leanings. In fact, we don't want to KNOW your leanings. We really don't. If it is a part of the story, we may choose to read or not to read BECAUSE you are so explicit. We don't need our minds filling with garbage or what to some of us is uninteresting stuff. It does not define the rest of us. Really!

Please, ladies, get over yourselves! There have been SO MANY great women authors over all of history. Beginning with: Uncle Tom's Cabin, anyone? I could compile a complete list here, but you get it, and I stand by my point.

Get in the game, ladies, and earn it. And in the meantime, why belabor it?

"In my field, web development,"

That says it all, regarding your viewpoint on exceptionalism vis a vis gender.

Oh, I just laugh. Revel in your feelings of male superiority, you obviously enjoy doing so, and believe the weight of historical evidence is on your side.

I believe the opposite.

To each their own interpretation of history (at least, for the purpose of responding to a Salon article).

I guess I just laugh because, guess what?, in my own novel I have a few male characters working in the computer field, expressing a viewpoint just like yours! It's a lot of fun to see a theme in one's novel brought to life as it were on the Web.

Hardee-har-har, really it is quite satisfying. Thanks for posting. It was a classic.

This is a rediculous article.. Deeply is a man, and has been reading and writing his whole life. He reads authors, male and female and never has thought 'Oh this book is written by a woman, nope it will not be 'A Great American Novel'.

He might have thought oh this is one of those trashy supermarket love stories ( see Captain Passion Tales and the Sea Slayers part way down the right side of the page of Deeply's blog) and I am not going to read it.

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres is fantastic and perhaps it is based on Shakespeare's Macbeth, but Deeply never thought about that either. What he did think was, it was pretty dam great, and contained insights a woman might have and a man might not.

I suggest that Elaine Showalter write some fiction instead of silly books like this article makes her's sound. People who cannot write become critics.

Oh And How about Willa Cather and Oh Pioneers. Ann Tyler and An Accidental Tourist to name a two more. Tony Morrison anyone?

Deeply has not read Elaine Showalter's book, but if this article is accurate, she probably wrote this book because she cannot write. Perhaps it is time for a Sabatical of Fiction.

Bla bla bla.

I've already read the Great American Novel by a Great American Woman, Ellen Currie.

It's called "Available Light" (not to be confused with Marge Piercy's poetry).

Currie’s “Available Light” is so skillfully written, so witty & seemingly effortlessly literate, so deceptively "light" and such a breeze to read that one can only surmise that the doltish-headed, gravitas-addicted, academically-afflicted, books-up-their-butts types (including the fishin fightin & fuckin-obsessed) simply overlook it.

Despite the above description I compare it in greatness to my favorite Great British Novel "Wuthering Heights," though it reads more like "Catcher in the Rye" if Holden were older, wiser, funnier, & less solipsistic.

Oh,and some huge themes are love and family. I see no need to apologize for that. Most of us humans could use more of the former, if not improvement on the latter.

I agree that Shirley Jackson is underrated. I even wrote a song about it (no writing of novels for me, thank you; I’ll stick with reading them).

As for tastes, well, you know what they say:

"Anyone who thinks "The Old Man & the Sea" is better than "Available Light" is probably a boorish, boring idiot."

...I think that’s how it goes...

Ellen, if you're out there, THANK YOU!

I didn't really see any counterevidence, or any indication that you did any real work in attempting a comeback.

It's not surprising that your argument is so soft, because I think it's probably incorrect.

I don't think you're denying there is such thing as a bell curve of intelligence. Obviously there is. I guess you are denying that it has anything to do with genetics.

I hear you saying social factors, but that catch-all is wearing thin.

"Social factors" is a long-standing rationale for why women don't achieve at the highest level at the same frequency as men. I can point to any field, from stand-up comedy to web development, to politics, to visual art, literature, literary criticism, the cello, the electric guitar, songwriting, physics, chemistry - the list goes on.

In both the arts and the sciences, in fields that require intense training, and those that are accessible to any kid with a computer, men are consistently at the top. In my field, web development, almost all the top people are self taught. They work at home. What, exactly, is holding women back from this field? The same description holds for the majority of rock musicians. Again, the great songwriters, lyricwriters, the virtuoso players, are almost all men.

I don't think you can say the same thing at all for race. I believe the major problem with our thinking there is that we tend to privilege one kind of intelligence - logical-mathematical intelligence - and undervalue other kinds of intelligence, such as musical intelligence, interpersonal, intrapersonal, verbal, spatial etc. It's possible that one race may be a little "better" than another at one or the other, but in general, it's just a matter of cultural emphasis. We - I think quite wrongly - assume logical-mathematical intelligence is the only "real" intelligence, when clearly it is not.

This fallacy has caused us to bend over backward swearing that we are all the same - when indeed we are not. That's because we're afraid that if we admit that there are difference in ability, that implies one is "better" than the other, which is entirely absurd when you break it down. The categories of "inferior" and "superior" when applied to race or gender are cyphers, meaningless and useless.

When you expand the definition of intelligence, you find high achievers in every race.

I'm neither sexist, nor racist - or at least, I'm no more sexist or racist than the average schmo - I'm just tired of stale rhetoric that begins by asserting an unquestionable premise then seeks to prove it.