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Why was Jay Gatsby such a party animal? What does the scarlet "A" stand for? How can it be both the best of times and the worst of times...at the same time? For confused high school and college students, such questions can only be answered by Cliff and his copious notes. Having saved many a slacker on the eve of a big exam, the study guides themselves are the result of a lot of hard work. As we learned from the CliffsNotes site, the booklets were named after their founder, Cliff Hillegass. A Nebraska native, Hillegass started his
company in 1958 by publishing guides for some of Shakespeare's greatest hits. Not surprisingly, students and teachers found them immensely useful. Sales increased from $18,500 in 1958 to $2 million in 1965. The man with the answers eventually sold his enterprise in 1999 to IDG Books for $14 million smackers. Not bad, Cliff. Not bad at all. This article from "Time" magazine, published around Cliff's death in 2001, explains that he was a great lover of books. Hillegass always discouraged those who bought his guides from using them as a substitute for reading the book. Whether those pleas fell on deaf (and desperate) ears, who can say? One
thing's for sure -- without Cliff's yellow and black booklets, many of us would surely still be floundering in English Lit 101, wondering why Ophelia couldn't just snap out of it.
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