The Christopher Morley Knothole Association held its annual reading contest at the Bryant Library, Tuesday night, Oct. 6. Four Roslyn High School students were among the 16 high school students who participated in the event.

When the reading contest was over, the home team participants did not disappoint. Each of the four RHS students delivered prize-winning readings. Lisa Schwartz and David Moskowitz took first-place honors, while Lisa Weinreb and Deborah Kroplick finished, respectively, with third and fourth-place awards.

Both Ms. Schwartz and Mr. Moskowitz read from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Ms. Weinreb read from Dust by Saki (H.H. Munro) and Ms. Kroplick read the "Hands" passage from Sherwood Anderson's novel of Midwestern small-town life, Winesburg, Ohio.

Anjali Saraf of Wheatley High School came in second for her reading of Thoreau's famous essay, Walden. Fourth-place honors also went to Kristin Kovner of Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington who read from Saki's The Interlopers. Other high schools represented at the event were Locust Valley, Mineola, and North Shore.

The judges selected winners based on "eloquence, interpretation, [and] suitability" of the excerpt and the students' own introductory remarks.

The contest itself is named for the famed British-born columnist, short story writer and dramatist who called Roslyn home for much of his adult life.

During the evening, each student had six minutes to deliver an introduction to their selected work and then read passages from one of the classic works of literature from a list of books called the "Golden Florins." This particular list, which includes works from Shakespeare, Chaucer, Melville, Keats, Blake, Donne, Hardy, Matthew Arnold, George Santayana, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, and Benjamin Franklin among others, came from Morley's desire to leave such books as treasures or "pieces of gold" to be handed down to future generations.

The readers in-depth introduction both explained the plot of their selected work and their reason for choosing it. For the next four minutes, each student read aloud one or more passages from the selected work.

In choosing his list all those years ago, Christopher Morley liked to recall the ancient story of Petrarch, the 14th century Italian poet and scholar, who left a provision in his will of 50 golden florins to be given to Boccaccio, his fellow Italian poet. Morley did Petrarch a little better, upping his own list to 85 works of literature.

The Knothole Association was formed by friends of Christopher Morley (1890-1957) with the purpose of preserving his log cabin writing studio in Roslyn (known as the Knothole) as both a memorial to the author and a center of interest for literary-minded folk. Throughout the year, the association holds activities designed to keep alive Morley's reputation and introduce his works and ideas to young people.