Date: 07/31/2007

Professor Scott Rice has announced the results of the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The competition was the brainchild of Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton's use of "it was a dark and stormy night" as the opening line for a book. The sentence was popularized by Charles M. Schulz and his famous cartoon beagle, Snoopy. San Jos?? State's Department of English and Comparative Literature has sponsored the contest since 1982. Read the winning entries. For more information, e-mail Rice.