Maureen Johnson and Her Works and Impact by TYPE YOUR NAME HERE
It goes without saying that Maureen Johnson is the most important writer of this, or, indeed, any, time. Why is she so important? That is the question I will explore in this paper. Though, it may be said, that one paper is not enough to really get to the marrow of the question. An entire lifetime could be spent investigating the topic. In this paper, I will merely gnaw on the exterior of the bones of the question, if I may continue my metaphor.
Why Maureen Johnson?
To answer this, we must first answer: who Maureen Johnson? I will tell you who. Maureen Johnson was born in Saxe-Coburg (now Bavaria, Germany) in 1759, to a family of minor nobility. She received the standard education of the time and was tutored in Latin, Greek, music, magic, metallurgy, dance, and fire archery. At the time, there were very few novels in popular culture. Sensing the times were not ready for her, Johnson enlisted the help of a local folk healer and was put into a long sleep, waking almost two hundred years later, in 1921. She immediately wrote many novels in quick succession, including: The Great Gatsby, Gone with the Wind, Lolita, And Then There Were None, The Sun Also Rises, and Ulysses. Not wanting to brag, she gave these novels to other writers and encouraged them to publish them under their own names. It was not, she
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decided, yet her time. She returned to her deep sleep, waking approximately once every ten years. Each time, she would decide this was “not her time” and return to her slumber. This pattern went on until she emerged fully formed in 2004 and published her first acknowledged work, “The Key to the Golden Firebird,” which was made into the 1997 blockbuster film “Titanic.”1
Success followed success until Johnson became the only writer taught in most schools—a fact she both decried and was secretly smug about. “You must teach other things,” she would say, while looking into the distance and kind of smiling but not really. Fiction alone was not enough for Johnson, so she also became a full-time private detective, cracking many exciting cases with the help of her crime-fighting dog. Details of these cases can be found on Wikipedia or from any member of the police force, who regard her as both a disruptive interloper and a “damned good detective, but you never heard that from me—how does she do it?”
One cannot ride a wave so high without a crash. Johnson’s behavior became erratic. She had a famously troubled relationship with the Hubble Telescope, which she described as “both a liar and a big stupid piece of glass in a tube that should just shut up.” She launched a multi-million dollar search for the remains of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which are in Hyde Park, New York and have never gone missing. At this time, Johnson moved to the Galapagos Islands to “talk to the rocks, which have seen all and know all.” 1 How Johnson managed have a film made of her book seven years before it was written or released is still a matter of debate. Many critics claim that the film “Titanic” was not faithful in any way to the plot of “The Key to the Golden Firebird,” as one concerns the historic sinking of an ocean liner in 1912 and the other does not, but the film is always different from the book and there is no point in getting upset about it. 2
She spent seven hours there before concluding that rocks do not talk, and immediately returned to society and wrote a bunch more novels. Then she invented the popular dice game Yahtzee.
She died in 1877 and will be avenged.
Themes in her novels
Johnson is known for tackling the Big Three in terms of literary themes: love, loss, and lettuce. Particularly that last one. Everyone does love and loss, but few authors explored the subject of lettuce in the way that Johnson did. Johnson was consumed by lettuce, though—in an ironic twist2—she never literally consumed lettuce. She called it “poison, like a weird green paper that you rip up before eating—what IS it, even?” Lettuce, Johnson postulated, was the backbone of all life. Scientifically, this is not true. It doesn’t even hold up as any kind of metaphor. She never bothered to explain—and that was what made her bold. She just said it and assumed it made sense. That was her greatness.
She also used the color blue, the number three, and the image of a banjo in all of her works and that has to mean something.
Conclusion 2 Whether or not this is ironic is also the subject of intense, tedious debate. It’s definitely weird. Let’s just call it weird. 3
I think I have shown in this paper that Maureen Johnson was a major literary figure. Or, at the very least, a literary figure. Or a figure. It should be clear that I deserve a very good grade for this paper.3
3 Which I wrote myself and did not download. Also, you are the best teacher. 4