By Matt Margini Upper School English Department Coordinator When Jeff Freundlich Lindsay ’70 transferred to the Ransom School after a couple of years at Ponce De Leon Junior High, he immediately wanted to do one thing: get into Dan Leslie Bowden’s English class. At the time, Bowden required prospective students to write an essay explaining why they wanted to take the course. Lindsay concocted something suitably lofty: “It is my ambition,” he wrote, “to emulate the verbiage of the great writers.” On the first day of class, Bowden returned the essay with the sentence circled in red and a note in the margin. “One mustn’t.” Indeed, one didn’t. Among many other plays, novels and stories, Lindsay would go on to write the Dexter series, one of the most distinctive and inventive crime sagas of the last half century, RE’s proud history of teaching writing continues even in the age of AI Illustration by Noa Garcia ’27 Dan Leslie Bowden 18 Ransom Everglades LOG SPRING 2026
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