id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-9599		Why Bother? (essay) - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	2162	175	59	"Why Bother?", originally published as "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels", is a literary essay by American novelist Jonathan Franzen. In the introduction to the collection, Franzen explained his changing the title as a response to the many interviewers asking about the essay but failing to understand its intention, believing the essay to be an explicit promise on Franzen's part of a third "Big Social Novel" featuring a good deal of local detail and observation.[3] Franzen, instead, thought of the essay as a defense of reading and writing literature for its own sake in a modern world, expanding the essay later in response.[3] Franzen noted that the original title was chosen by a Harper's editor hoping for easy recognition with Hamlet's soliloquy, but that interviewers frequently referred to the work as "The Harper's Essay".	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-9599.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-9599.txt