James Finn Garner

Garner, James Finn (1960– ), American writer, whose adaptations of fairy tales and fables satirize the language and politics of political correctness. Garner's first collection, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, appeared in 1994. It became an international best‐seller, and he followed it up a year later with Once Upon a More Enlightened Time (1995). In his revisionist tales, millers and tailors are not poor, but ‘economically disadvantaged’; witches are not wicked, but ‘kindness impaired’; Snow White's hosts are ‘vertically‐challenged’; and the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is ‘unhampered by traditionalist notions of what was masculine or feminine’. Garner's hyperbole is most evident in his penchant for neologism: ‘lookist’, ‘speciesist’, and ‘mer‐persuns’.

— Mary Beth Stein