To the Editor:

Re “Hype Over Novel on Migrants Turns Into Backlash for Author” (front page, Jan. 26):

The critics of Jeanine Cummins assert that she is guilty of appropriation because the protagonist in her novel “American Dirt” is a Mexican woman fleeing the drug cartel, and Ms. Cummins is not. Therefore, Shakespeare should not have written “Othello,” Joyce “Ulysses,” Flaubert “Madame Bovary” or George Eliot “Silas Marner.” Everyone is condemned to write autobiographies.

It’s fiction! “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Oscar Wilde said. “Books are well written, or badly written.” Picasso added that “art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”

The lies of Ms. Cummins’s critics threaten all art.

David Jelinek

New York

To the Editor:

Was Harriet Beecher Stowe guilty of “enslavement porn” or “cultural appropriation” when she wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?

Yes, it is a sentimental, stereotyped portrayal of enslaved people in the South by a white woman, but it was a runaway best seller and helped turn the tide of public opinion against slavery in the 1850s.