''Up the Down Staircase'' is a novel written by Bel Kaufman, published in 1964, which spent 64 weeks on ''The New York Times'' Best Seller list. In 1967 it was released as a film starring

Sandy Dennis Sandra Dale Dennis (April 27, 1937 – March 2, 1992) was an American actress. She made her film debut in the drama ''Splendor in the Grass'' (1961). For her performance in the comedy-drama film ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' (1966), she rec ...

Patrick Bedford Patrick Bedford (May 30, 1932, Dublin, Ireland – November 20, 1999; New York City, United States) was an Irish stage and television actor. He began his career in the 1950s at the Gate Theatre in Dublin then under the direction of Hilton Ed ...

, Ruth White,

Jean Stapleton Jean Stapleton (born Jeanne Murray; January 19, 1923 – May 31, 2013) was an American character actress of stage, television and film. Stapleton was best known for playing Edith Bunker, the perpetually optimistic and devoted wife of Arc ...

and

Eileen Heckart Anna Eileen Heckart ( Herbert; March 29, 1919 – December 31, 2001) was an American stage and screen actress whose career spanned nearly 60 years. Early life Heckart was born Anna Eileen Herbert in Columbus, Ohio. The daughter of Esther (), ...

Plot

Sylvia Barrett, an idealistic English teacher at an

inner city The term ''inner city'' has been used, especially in the United States, as a euphemism for majority-minority lower-income residential districts that often refer to rundown neighborhoods, in a downtown or city centre area. Sociologists some ...

high school, hopes to nurture her students' interest in classic literature (especially

Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...

and writing). She quickly becomes discouraged during her first year of teaching, frustrated by bureaucracy, the indifference of her students, and the incompetence of many of her colleagues. The title of the book is taken from a memo telling her why a student was being punished: he had gone "up the down staircase". She decides to leave the public school (government-funded) system to work in a smaller private setting. She changes her mind, though, when she realizes that she has, indeed, touched the lives of her students. The novel is epistolary; aside from opening and closing chapters consisting entirely of dialogue the story is told through memos from the office, fragments of notes dropped in the trash can, essays handed in to be graded, lesson plans, suggestions dropped in the class suggestion box, and most often by inter-classroom notes that are a dialogue between Sylvia and an older teacher. Sylvia also writes letters to a friend from college who chose to get married and start a family rather than pursuing a career. The letters serve as a recap and summary of key events in the book, and offer a portrait of women's roles and responsibilities in American society in the mid-1960s. An inter-classroom note in which the older teacher is translating the jargon of the memos from the office includes the memorable epigram Let it be a challenge to you' means you're stuck with it." Calling a trash can a circular file comes from the same memo: Keep on file in numerical order' means throw in waste-basket." Another, "It has come to my attention" means "You're in trouble."

Adaptations

The novel has been adapted to film and the stage.

Tad Mosel Tad Mosel (May 1, 1922 – August 24, 2008) was an American playwright and one of the leading dramatists of hour-long teleplay genre for live television during the 1950s. He received the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play '' All the Way H ...

wrote the screenplay for the 1967

film version A film adaptation is the transfer of a work or story, in whole or in part, to a feature film. Although often considered a type of derivative work, film adaptation has been conceptualized recently by academic scholars such as Robert Stam as a dia ...

starring

as Sylvia Barrett. The play is frequently performed in high school drama classes. The film version was parodied in '' Mad'' magazine as "In the Out Exit" in regular issue #118, April 1968. ''Up the Down Staircase'' title was parodied by the '' South Park'' episode " Up the Down Steroid".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Up The Down Staircase 1964 American novels American novels adapted into films Epistolary novels Novels set in high schools and secondary schools Novels set in the United States