What if a group of Victorian literati decided that the secret to great writing was simply dreaming? This is the deliciously absurd premise of John Kendrick Bangs' late-nineteenth-century satire, a book that takes brilliant aim at the literary pretensions of his era. Bedford Parke, Tenafly Paterson, and their earnest cohorts form a club called The Dreamers, convinced that dreams hold the key to literary inspiration. Their solution to the "mechanical difficulty" of writing: hire a stenographer. Each month they gather for a feast of dream-inducing foods, then head home to sleep and record their visions. The comedy writes itself. Bangs skewers the pomposity of literary ambition and the lengths to which writers will go to avoid actual work. These men believe great prose requires "very little intellectual labor" and proceed to prove exactly how wrong they are. It's a travesty of literary culture, but also a surprisingly sharp commentary on artistic self-delusion that still resonates.
