In Popular Culture
A reinterpretation of the historical mantle exists in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In the story, Fard's real name is Jimmy Zizmo, and he is a small time bootlegger of rumored Greek-Turkish-Pontian descent who fakes his death upon suspecting that his wife is having an affair and that he is not the father to their daughter. Having convinced everyone that he is dead, he assumes the Fard identity, apparently out of a desire to reaffirm his Turkish roots. Just as in real life, the Fard-Zizmo character disappears after the ritual murder scandal.
Read more about this topic: Wallace Fard Muhammad
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)