"""It was a dark and stormy night"", the ""standard"" for hackneyed writing, was the opening line of a novel by whom?"
It was a dark and stormy night It was a dark and stormy night "It was a dark and stormy night" is an often-mocked and parodied phrase considered to represent "the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing", also known as purple prose. The phrase was first used by Washington Irving in his 1809 "A History of New York". Its status as a catchphrase for bad writing comes from the opening sentence of English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel "Paul Clifford": "Writer's Digest" described this sentence as "the literary posterchild for bad story starters". On the other hand, the "American Book Review" ranked it
It was a dark and stormy night San Jose State University, recognizes the worst examples of "dark and stormy night" writing. It challenges entrants to compose "the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels." The "best" of the resulting entries have been published in a series of paperback books, starting with "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" in 1984. It was a dark and stormy night "It was a dark and stormy night" is an often-mocked and parodied phrase considered to represent "the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing", also known as purple prose. The phrase was first used by