LIFE AND BACKGROUND OF THE AUTHOR
Charles Leroux was born in Fond du Lac, Wis. He majored in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, then earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern. He has been a Tribune writer and editor since 1974.
INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK
When he was a student, Leroux was aware of the clandestine but omnipresent CliffsNotes. Then he forgot about them. Recently, he saw a press release from the publisher of CliffsNotes, was intrigued by their durability, and thought it was time to look in on these classic examples of that American preoccupation, the short cut.
A BRIEF SYNOPSIS
CliffsNotes were bought by a parent corporation two years ago. The parent is positioning the Notes as a more reputable product, with aspirations of becoming truly high-level study guides with an academic seal of approval.
LIST OF CHARACTERS
Greg, publishing director for literature and education at Hungry Minds Inc.; Dale, an associate director at the National Council of Teachers of English; Susan, a high school teacher from Monmouth, Ill.; Gary, former editor of CliffsNotes; Clifton Hillegass, founder of CliffsNotes.
For years, any student spotted taking the study guide, CliffsNotes, into a classroom was looked upon with the same suspicion as someone toting a drill and dynamite into a bank.
A 1997 Washington Post newspaper article branded the Notes “the secret ingredient in many sheepskins.” Another called it “freeze-dried scholarship” and “a conspicuous symbol of condensed Americana.” A CliffsNotes editor admitted that his product long has had a reputation as a “cheater’s tool.”
The duration and intensity of this reputation has ushered “CliffsNotes” into the language to mean a kind of quick and dirty way of doing things, as in “TV dinners are the CliffsNotes of cuisine.”
But this year, as we enter the high season for final exams and term papers — the traditional season as well for the notorious black and yellow, diagonal-striped guides — something is noticeably different.
As CliffsNotes reach middle age — they are 42 years old now — they are becoming respectable.
“I didn’t hear a single negative comment, and I’m really attuned to listening for them,” said Greg Tubach, publishing director for literature and education at Hungry Minds Inc. (formerly IDG Books), publishers of the “Dummies” book series and, since 1998, of CliffsNotes. Tubach was referring to the treatment his product received at the recent Milwaukee convention of the National Council of Teachers of English and he noted: “In the four years I’ve been with CliffsNotes, that represents a change.”
Some of the grudging acceptance from the education community grows out of familiarity. Over time, 100 million CliffsNotes have been sold. By now there can’t be many members of any English faculty who haven’t, as students, given in to the lure of, for instance, 96 pages of explanation of “Moby Dick” rather than the 595 smallish-type pages of one paperback edition of the classic. Possibly they even used them the “right” way — in conjunction with reading the text. As some editions of Cliffs have warned: “These notes are not a substitute for the text itself . . . Students who attempt to use them in this way are denying themselves the very education that they are presumably giving their most vital years to achieve.”
The other step toward respectability comes as the modern versions of CliffsNotes go beyond mere plot summaries. They now probe and support the original work with self-tests, glossaries, maps charting the relationships between characters, keys to underlying themes, and literary and stylistic devices. They also list critical works written about the title or author, pertinent Internet sites, films and audio tapes based on the literary work.
With so many hooks into the original, some teachers are now giving up fighting the notes and are, instead, joining them. They are finding CliffsNotes useful in classroom discussions, even assigning them to be read in conjunction with the original. The notes carry a phone number teachers can call for suggestions on how to use them in class. New editions of the notes come out of comments from teachers in focus groups.
Beyond the classroom, CliffsNotes suggests that adults pursuing lifetime learning employ the notes to help them understand such long-postponed challenges as “The Odyssey” or James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
Another suggestion from a CliffsNotes promotional release is: “Think of CliffsNotes as movie trailers. You liked the trailer, you’ll want to see the movie. Get hooked by a CliffsNote, and you will want to read the book.” Another suggestion is that the notes can be used to prepare one to better understand a movie; for instance, reading the notes on “All the Pretty Horses” before watching the Matt Damon film.
Certainly the notes are cheap enough, at $4.99, to make a variety of uses possible. They also are widely available, not just in campus and other bookstores but in libraries (in tasteful black-and-gold bindings) and on the Internet. In fact, if the universal nightmare of having forgotten to study for a next-day test turns out to be true, CliffsNotes are available as downloads (same $4.99 price) 24 hours a day.
New ways of teaching literature also have made CliffsNotes more accepted in that it now is more difficult for students to rely solely on them.
“The old image of CliffsNotes as replacement texts is changing to one of supplemental texts,” said Dale Allender, associate executive director for secondary level at the Urbana-based National Council of Teachers of English. “Teachers now will require students to synthesize several different texts; and, if students aren’t reading the texts, it will show up.”
English teacher Susan Van Kirk, who has taught at Monmouth High School in Monmouth, Ill., for 31 years, often has recommended CliffsNotes to her students. “When we have a foreign exchange student, for example,” she said, “who may speak English, but could really use some help understanding the 19th Century Southern dialect in `Huckleberry Finn.'” She suggested the CliffsNotes guide to William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” to two girls who wanted to read the novel in an independent study course. “That’s not a book usually read at the high school level,” Van Kirk said, “but they did extremely well with it.”
CliffsNotes have made Van Kirk — on her first attempt — a best-selling author. During the week of Sept. 25th, the CliffsNotes Van Kirk wrote on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” was number 140 on USA Today’s best-seller list, outpacing sales of the original text (“We assume that means many families already own copies of that text,” said a CliffsNotes spokeswoman). The week of Oct. 2nd, it climbed to 138 and then dropped out of the top 150, reflecting the early-in-the-school-year rush of high school and college students to master an assigned novel.
Van Kirk got the writing assignment when, after attaining a master’s degree, she sent her resume to IDG. Tubach thought she might be the right person for the revised edition notes on what perennially is the series best seller (except in 1984 when a certain George Orwell novel won out on the basis of timeliness). She thought so too, having taught “The Scarlete Letter” any number of times and having a good sense of what students tended to have trouble with.
“They have no background in Puritan thought about religion,” she noted, “and they struggle with the layers of symbolism and the many metaphors.” Although she had taught “The Scarlet Letter”often and says it is one of her favorite novels, she prepared for writing the notes on Hawthorne’s classic by “reading it again, cover to cover, word by word.” She also read critical works on the book and its author, comparing critical assessments from a half century ago with modern ones.
CliffsNotes authors are paid a sum the company doesn’t want to disclose, though Tubach said $5,000 is in the ballpark. The authors are teaching professionals at the college and high school levels, many of them, like Van Kirk, residing in the Midwest, reflecting, perhaps the Midwestern roots of the series. CliffsNotes began with Nebraskan Clifton K. Hillegass, the now retired namesake of the notes — which in the past had the visual pun of a stylized drawing of mountain cliffs on the covers, was originally two separate words and has always gone with the non-apostrophed spelling.
In a 1989 Tribune interview, Gary Carey, then editor of CliffsNotes, repeated his advice to those who wrote for him: “Take a Polaroid photo of your class and tape it to your personal computer; and, as you write, I want you to look at that picture and remind yourself that you’re writing for those students, not for yourself or your peers.”
Hillegass, a textbook salesman in Lincoln, Neb., borrowed the idea from a Canadian colleague who had put out a series of guides to Shakespeare there. He also borrowed $4,000 from the bank. The birthplace of the original guides to 16 Shakespearean plays was Hillegass’ basement. He soon went beyond the Bard to “A Tale of Two Cities,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and other titles. Today the more than 300 CliffsNotes titles represent lots of additions but also some deletions (say goodbye to the “Vicar of Wakefield”).
Those comings and goings are a reflection of teaching trends, not just such sea changes as the erosion of the New Criticism (in which text rather than context matters) and the rise of Historicism (social, political and historical context must be considered) but also market research into specific titles.
“The Internet has become a wonderful market research tool for me,” Tubach said. “Colleges and high schools are posting their curricula and syllabi on Web sites. I can look at what’s being taught and gauge the market. For example, I tracked `Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,’ a historical memoir by Harriet Jacobs. When it became a staple of English curricula, it became a candidate for CliffsNotes.”
The Jacobs book also is an instance of classroom interest in works beyond such classics as “Ivanhoe” and “The Last of the Mohicans,” a rising focus on books that reflect a greater ethnic and cultural diversity (“The Color Purple,” “The Joy Luck Club,” “House Made of Dawn”.)
Twice a year, Tubach meets with teachers at the National Council of Teachers of English conventions. He also reads the council’s journal, looking at titles and at what teachers are saying about them.
Despite the publisher’s catering to increasingly accepting teachers, remnants of the old stigma against CliffsNotes persist. In 1997, the notes were banned from the bookstore at Villanova University in Villanova, Pa. Though he admitted that, “Every person in America has used CliffsNotes,” the school’s vice president for academic affairs said he felt that the ban was symbolically beneficial. CliffsNotes took out an ad in the student newspaper claiming the ban was an affront to the First Amendment and silly in that students bent on plagiarism would still have access to the guides from a variety of sources and could employ other crutches such as term paper writing services.
Van Kirk agreed that students determined to substitute CliffsNotes for the real thing could do so. To prevent such misuse, she devotes some class time to discussing the evils of commandeering someone else’s work.
IDG Books bought CliffsNotes in 1998 for $14 million and last June moved the editing offices out of a corrugated-metal building in Lincoln to Indianapolis to join IDG (which recently became Hungry Minds). Tubach said annual sales now are “in the millions.” This despite the fact that CliffsNotes often are passed from friend to friend, family member to family member.
In addition to new versions of old favorites (the top five best sellers are “The Scarlet Letter,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “The Great Gatsby”) CliffsNotes have issued CliffsComplete editions, books combining the notes with the complete original text. Future plans include expansion of the complete editions and a foray into historical documents.
While gaining respectability over its 42 years, CliffsNotes also has gained competitors — Barron’s Book Notes, Monarch Notes and Max Notes. Tubach said he doesn’t know what share of the market CliffsNotes commands but noted, “If you show the black and yellow stripes to a group of people, most will know that stands for CliffsNotes.”
