Notes For February 20th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On February 20th, 1926, the famous American writer Richard Matheson was born in Allendale, New Jersey. Born to Norwegian immigrant parents, he would grow up in Brooklyn, New York.

In 1943, after graduating from high school, he joined the military and served as an infantry soldier during World War II. After the war ended, Matheson enrolled at the University of Missouri, where he earned a degree in journalism.

His first published short story, Born of Man and Woman, appeared in 1950, in an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The story is narrated in broken English by the grotesque mutant eight-year-old son of a normal couple.

The "normal" parents keep their son chained up in the cellar and beat him frequently. When the mutant boy breaks the rules and sneaks upstairs to spy on his parents, he discovers that he has a normal little sister whom he never met or knew existed.

Encouraged by his first sale, Matheson moved to California, hoping to become a professional writer. There, he married his girlfriend, Ruth Ann Woodson. They had four children, three of whom (Chris, Ali, and Richard Christian Matheson) would also become writers.

Richard Matheson's first novel, Someone is Bleeding, was published in 1953, but his third novel, I Am Legend (1954), made his name as a writer. In it, a man named Robert Neville finds that he is apparently the last man left alive on Earth.

A pandemic quickly wiped out the rest of the world's population, but Neville is immune for some reason. He soon discovers that he is not alone; the world is still inhabited by the infected - who have become vampires that crave his blood.

The disease has mutated and the vampires can now spend brief periods of time in the daylight. After overcoming alcoholism and depression, Neville tries to find a cure for the disease before the vampires become indestructible.

I Am Legend would be adapted three times as a feature film: The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007) starring Will Smith as Robert Neville.

Matheson's classic 1956 novel, The Shrinking Man, told the story of Scott Carey, a man exposed to radiation after accidentally ingesting an insecticide. The combination of the two alters Carey's biochemical structure, causing him to shrink in size a little every day.

Most of the story finds Carey at only seven inches tall. Ordinary small objects and creatures become terrifying. As he keeps shrinking, Carey soon realizes that he won't shrink to death, as he'd feared. Instead, he'll keep shrinking until he's the size of an atom.

The Shrinking Man is actually a scathing satire of 1950s white middle class manhood. When Scott Carey shrinks to doll size, he finds that he is no longer the man of the house. Now, his wife and children are intimidating him for a change - a huge blow to his ego and masculinity.

The Shrinking Man would be adapted by the author himself as the cult classic film The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). It would also be adapted as The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), a comic fantasy about the dangers of industrial chemicals and deceptive advertising.

Lily Tomlin starred as an average housewife and mother whose exposure to chemicals in everything from laundry detergents to foods, combined with her unique body chemistry, causes her to shrink a little every day. When she reaches doll size, she becomes a media sensation.

In 1958, Matheson published A Stir of Echoes, a supernatural horror novel about a mild-mannered working class fellow, Tom Wallace, who is hypnotized at a party by his brother-in-law. Wallace doubts the effectiveness of hypnosis until a post-hypnotic suggestion unlocks formidable psychic powers within him.

Suddenly able to read minds and predict the future, Tom's life plunges into a downward spiral. Then the ghost of a murder victim begins haunting him, desperately searching for justice and peace. This memorable novel would be adapted as the horror film Stir of Echoes in 1999.

Matheson's 1975 fantasy novel Bid Time Return told the story of playwright Richard Collier, recently diagnosed with an inoperable, terminal brain tumor, who uses his mind to travel back in time to meet Elise McKenna, a famous stage actress from the past, after falling in love with a portrait of her.

Bid Time Return was adapted as a feature film titled Somewhere In Time in 1980, directed by Jeannot Zwarc (best known for his previous film Jaws 2) and starring Christopher Reeve and Jayne Seymour. Taking liberties with the novel, it was panned by critics and a box office dud, but it attracted a cult following over the years.

Richard Matheson's success as a novelist and short story writer got him noticed by television. He would write fourteen episodes of the classic TV series, The Twilight Zone (1959-64). His memorable episodes include the classic Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

In this episode, an aerophobic salesman (William Shatner) notices something terrifying during his flight - a gremlin clinging to the plane's wing, trying to destroy the aircraft. Is it real or all in his mind?

Another great Twilight Zone episode Matheson wrote was Little Girl Lost. In it, a little girl falls out of her bed in the middle of the night and tumbles through a gateway into another dimension. Her father must go through and attempt a daring rescue before the door closes forever.

Little Girl Lost has been credited as an inspiration for the classic 1982 horror film Poltergeist, produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, and was parodied in a segment of one of the Treehouse of Horror Halloween episodes of The Simpsons.

Matheson and his close friend, writer Charles Beaumont, who also wrote for The Twilight Zone, belonged to the Southern California Writing Group in the 1950s and 60s. Other members included Ray Bradbury, William F. Nolan, Jerry Sohl, and George Clayton Johnson.

In the 1970s, Matheson wrote the screenplays for two TV movies, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, which were based on a horror novel by Jeff Rice called The Kolchak Papers. The popular movies would spawn the short lived cult classic TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75).

The first of Matheson's TV movies, The Night Stalker (1972), received record ratings for a TV movie. Darren McGavin starred as Carl Kolchak, a shrewd, nosy, obnoxious, wisecracking newspaper reporter covering a series of bizarre murders in Las Vegas.

All the victims were completely drained of blood. The police think they're dealing with an insane serial killer, but Kolchak's investigation leads him to something more terrifying - a vampire. After Kolchak destroys the vampire, the police launch a cover-up and run him out of town.

The sequel, The Night Stangler (1973), finds Kolchak in Seattle, uncovering another supernatural mystery - identical series of murders that have occurred every 21 years since 1931. The killer is on the prowl again, draining more victims of their blood.

This time, instead of a vampire, the killer is a former Civil War surgeon who discovered an elixir of life that grants him immortality. The formula must be taken every 21 years and requires a quantity of human blood from unwilling donors.

Richard Matheson wrote over two dozen novels and numerous short stories, as well as film and TV screenplays. He won several awards and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010. His final novel, Generations, was published in 2012.

He died in 2013 at the age of 87.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Life is a risk; so is writing. You have to love it."

- Richard Matheson

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a Writers Guild Foundation interview with Richard Matheson. Enjoy!

Notes For February 19th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On February 19th, 1917, the famous American writer Carson McCullers was born. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her mother was the granddaughter of a Confederate war hero, her father a watchmaker and jeweler.

As a child, Carson McCullers was a musical prodigy. She began taking piano lessons at the age of ten. For her fifteenth birthday, her father gave her a typewriter. Nevertheless, she aspired to become a concert pianist.

In September of 1934, when she was seventeen years old, McCullers left home on a steamship bound for New York City, where she planned to study piano at Juilliard. Unfortunately, she lost her tuition money and was unable to attend the school.

McCullers then worked menial jobs while she taking creative writing classes at both Columbia University and New York University. By 1936, at the age of nineteen, her first short story, Wunderkind, was published in Story magazine.

She'd found a new passion and decided to become a writer. A year later, in 1937, she married her husband, Reeves McCullers, an ex-soldier turned aspiring writer. They would separate in 1940. That year, Carson McCullers published her breakthrough debut novel, which established her as one of the greatest writers of her generation.

Set in the Depression-era American South, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter told the story of four ragtag misfits whose varied lives have several things in common - loneliness, isolation, and seemingly unattainable dreams.

Mick Kelly is a restless 14-year-old tomboy with androgynous looks and musical talent forced to be a mother to her siblings and go to work to support her family; Jake Blount is an alcoholic itinerant laborer whose socialist convictions get him into trouble.

Dr. Benedict Copeland, a black physician, suffers from both tuberculosis and his desire to help free his people from racist oppression. Biff Brannon is a married cafe owner whose masculine appearance masks his inner struggle with his bisexuality.

All four characters are connected by a mutual friend, John Singer, an intelligent deaf-mute who can write, sign, and read lips. They all find peace in Singer's kindness, wisdom, and willingness to listen to and understand them. What they don't know is that Singer is just like them, suffering in silence.

His companion of ten years - a big Greek man and fellow deaf-mute named Spiros Antonapoulos - became mentally ill and was institutionalized by a relative. While Singer was there to listen to other people's problems and comfort them, there is no one to listen to Singer and comfort him, which ultimately leads to tragedy.

All the characters in the novel are sad and intriguing, but there is nothing sentimental about their sadness. In fact, one of the novel's main themes is the selfish nature of loneliness and emotional detachment. The most intriguing characters are Mick Kelly and Biff Brannon, with their sexual ambiguity.

At first, Mick dresses like a boy and acts like one, too. But after experiencing her first romantic relationship with Harry, a Jewish neighbor boy, which results in her first sexual experience, Mick changes her appearance, dressing and acting more like a lady.

Biff Brannon, impotent and emotionally distant from his wife, finds himself sexually attracted to the boyish-looking Mick, but rather than act on his impulses, he keeps his emotional distance.

When Mick starts dressing and acting like a woman, Biff loses sexual interest in her, but warms up to her emotionally. After his wife Alice dies, Biff feels little grief - their marriage was loveless - but he starts wearing her clothes and perfume.

There is also a strong homoerotic tone to the relationship between John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos - in the beginning, the two deaf-mute men walk together arm in arm, and later, Singer longs for his institutionalized companion - but they are not specifically described as a gay couple.

Carson McCullers was only 23 years old when The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was published. For such a young novelist to have crafted such a deep and profound novel is amazing. The book became an overnight success, receiving rave reviews.

Critics admired McCullers' handling of racial issues (Dr. Copeland is angry with his fellow blacks who refuse to stand up for their rights and choose to accept their unequal status in society with aplomb) and the evils of anti-communist hysteria.

Her novel would foreshadow the coming of both the civil rights movement and the anti-communist witch hunts that would take place a decade after its publication, conducted by Joseph McCarthy, the notoriously corrupt Republican Senator from Wisconsin.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter would be adapted as a feature film in 1968, (starring Alan Arkin as John Singer) and as a stage play in 2005.

In 1946, McCullers published another classic novel, The Member of the Wedding. It told the story of Frankie Addams, a lonely and alienated 12-year-old tomboy who dreams of running away to join her brother and his new wife on their honeymoon in Alaska.

The semi-autobiographical novel was based on McCullers' childhood. It explores the nature of racial and sexual identity, as Frankie is close to her family's black maid and wishes that people could "change back and forth from boys to girls." She would later adapt her novel as a Broadway play.

The issues of sexual identity raised in The Member of the Wedding came from the fact that McCullers herself was bisexual and had struggled with her own identity. Her volatile marriage didn't help matters.

After her separation, she moved in with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar, but ended up remarrying Reeves McCullers in 1945. Three years later, while suffering from depression, she attempted suicide.

Five years after that, in 1953, Reeves tried to convince Carson to commit suicide with him. She left him and he killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Her 1957 play, The Square Root of Wonderful, was an attempt to come to terms with these painful experiences.

Carson McCullers was sickly throughout her life; she suffered strokes since childhood and contracted rheumatic fever when she was fifteen. By the time she was 31, strokes had paralyzed her left side completely.

She died of a brain hemorrhage in 1967 at the age of fifty. Her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, which she dictated during the last few months of her life, was published posthumously in 1999.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination."

- Carson McCullers

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a rare 1956 interview with Carson McCullers. Enjoy!

Notes For February 18th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On February 18th, 1885, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the classic novel by the legendary American writer Mark Twain, was published. It was a sequel to his previous classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn finds Tom Sawyer's best friend Huck Finn on an adventure of his own. The novel opens with Huck under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas.

The widow, along with her sister Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" Huck. While he appreciates their efforts, he feels stifled by civilized life. With help from his best friend Tom Sawyer, Huck sneaks out one night.

When Huck's shiftless father Pap, a nasty, abusive drunkard, suddenly appears, Huck wants no part of him. Unfortunately, Pap regains custody of Huck and they move to the backwoods, where Pap keeps Huck locked in his cabin. Huck escapes and runs away down the Mississippi River.

He soon meets up with Miss Watson's slave, Jim, who has also run away, after Miss Watson threatened to sell him downriver, where life for slaves is brutal. Although he's headed for Cairo, Illinois, Jim's final destination is Ohio, a free state where slavery is illegal.

He hopes to buy his family's freedom and move them there. At first, Huck is unsure about whether or not he should report Jim for running away. Throughout the novel, as Huck travels with Jim and talks with him, the two form a close friendship.

Huck begins to change his mind about slavery, people, and life in general. He comes to believe that Jim is an intelligent, compassionate man who deserves his freedom. One day, Huck and Jim find an entire house floating down the river. They enter it, hoping to find food and valuables.

Instead, in one room, Jim finds the body of Huck's father, Pap, who was apparently shot in the back while robbing the house. Jim won't let Huck see the dead man's face and doesn't tell him that it's Pap.

Later, to find out what's going on in the area, Huck dresses up in drag and passes himself off as a girl named Sarah Williams. He meets a woman and enters her house, hoping that she won't recognize him as a boy.

She tells him that there's a $300 bounty on Jim's head, as he is accused of killing Huckleberry Finn! The woman becomes suspicious of Huck's disguise. When she tricks him into revealing that he's a boy, Huck runs off. He warns Jim of the manhunt, then they pack up and flee.

As Huck and Jim continue their journey, they encounter more people and more trouble. First, they get caught in the middle of a blood feud between two families, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Then they rescue two clever con men and get caught up in their schemes.

Huck is outraged when one of the grifters turns Jim in for the reward. Even though it's against the law and a sin, (it's considered theft) Huck helps Jim escape after rejecting the advice of his conscience and famously declaring, "All right, then, I'll go to Hell!"

Around this time, Huck witnesses the attempted lynching of a Southern gentleman, Colonel Sherburn. The Colonel turns back the lynch mob with his rifle - and a long speech about the cowardly nature of "Southern justice."

Although Huck had helped Jim escape from custody, he is soon recaptured. Later, Huck learns that Miss Watson died, and in her will, she freed Jim. When Jim tells Huck that the dead man they found in the floating house was his father, he realizes that he can finally go home.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is rightfully considered an all-time classic work of American literature. Although geared toward young readers, the novel has become a favorite of readers of all ages. It has been adapted numerous times for the radio, stage, screen, and television.

A month after it was first published, a public library in Concord, Massachusetts, banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its shelves, calling the novel tawdry, coarse, and ignorant. It was the beginning of a controversy that continues to this day.

From its first publication through the early 1950s, bans and challenges to the novel were the result of its condemnations of slavery and lynching, and its depiction of a black slave who proves to be more intelligent and compassionate than the white Southerners who had enslaved him.

Since the late 1950s, (when the Civil Rights movement began to gain momentum) the novel has faced bans and challenges in classrooms and school libraries from black activists for its frequent use of the racial epithet nigger and for its allegedly racist stereotyping of blacks.

Twain scholars point out that in using nigger, the author criticized white Southerners' racism by letting them speak their own ugly language. Those who decry the novel as racist fail to place it in its proper historical context.

In 2011, NewSouth Books, a publishing house in Alabama, issued a controversial new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - a bowdlerized edition with all uses of the word nigger changed to slave, and the word injun deleted entirely.

Suzanne La Rosa, co-founder of NewSouth Books, claimed that the changes make the novel more acceptable for the classroom, but scholars derided it as an attempt to whitewash the long history of white Southerners' virulent racism, which continues to this day.

Nevertheless, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains an all-time classic work of literature.

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Quote Of The Day

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"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

- Mark Twain

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 2/16/25

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Pamelyn Casto

OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters just published my essay, A Close Reading of Spencer Holst's "The Zebra Storyteller. You can see Holst's fable along with my analysis of it here.

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Notes For February 14th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On February 14th, 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest, the classic play the by legendary Irish writer Oscar Wilde, opened in London. Wilde had written the first draft of the play in just three weeks. It was the fastest play he ever wrote.

The Importance of Being Earnest was also Wilde's most famous play. In this satire of the foibles and hypocrisy of the British upper class, young aristocrat Jack Worthing invents a fictional younger brother named Earnest.

Jack uses his fictitious sibling as a way of getting out of trouble. Sometimes he pretends to be Earnest to pursue women. When Jack's friend and fellow aristocrat Algernon Moncrieff learns about Earnest, he also assumes Earnest's identity for his own duplicitous purposes.

Jack and Algernon's plans backfire when the women they're pursuing think they're in love with the same man called Earnest. In a surprise twist, it turns out that Algernon, who has been impersonating Jack's fictitious sibling, really is Jack's long lost brother.

The Importance of Being Earnest earned rave reviews and became a hit. It's considered Oscar Wilde's best play. It would also be his last. It closed after 83 performances because of a scandal that had ensnared the playwright.

Wilde was a bisexual who, although married to a woman and the father of her children, preferred men. During his time - the Victorian era in England - homosexuality was considered both a disgrace and a crime under British law punishable by imprisonment.

The Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde's male lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, publicly accused Wilde of being a "posing sodomite," so Wilde made a complaint of criminal libel against him. The Marquess was arrested and released on bail.

A team of detectives led his lawyers to London's gay underground, and details of Wilde's associations with male prostitutes, transvestites, and gay brothels were soon uncovered and leaked to the press, which assailed him nonstop.

Queensberry's lawyers claimed that the libel was done for the public good. He was acquitted and Wilde found himself arrested for "gross indecency" - a term for homosexual acts that were illegal under British law.

The jury in Wilde's first trial failed to reach a verdict. At his final trial, presided by Justice Sir Alfred Wills, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to the maximum of two years imprisonment - a sentence that the judge believed was too lenient for the crime of homosexuality.

Wilde served his sentence at three different prisons. By the time of his release, prison life had left him in poor health. He spent his last years abroad in self-imposed exile, living under the alias Sebastian Melmoth.

The name was based on St. Sebastian (a Christian martyr believed to have been gay) and the main character of Melmoth The Wanderer, a Gothic novel written by Wilde's great uncle, Charles Robert Maturin.

Wilde was broke, so his wife, who refused to meet with him or let him see his children, sent him money when she could. He took up with his first lover, Robert Ross, and they spent the summer of 1897 together in Northern France, where Wilde wrote his classic poem, The Battle Of Reading Gaol.

Despite the objections of their families and friends, Wilde later reunited with Bosie Douglas, and they lived together in Italy in late 1897. But they broke up again, for good.

Wilde settled at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris, where, it has been said, he lived the uninhibited gay lifestyle that had been denied him in England. He died of cerebral meningitis on November 30th, 1900, at the age of 46.

Some have speculated that the meningitis was a complication of syphilis, but Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, said that it was a complication of a surgical procedure, most likely a mastoidectomy. Wilde's own doctors blamed the meningitis on an old suppuration of the right ear.

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Quote Of The Day

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"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

- Oscar Wilde

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete live performance of Oscar Wilde's classic play The Importance of Being Earnest. Enjoy!

Notes For February 13th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On February 13th, 1991, the famous auction house Sotheby's announced that the original draft of Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) had been discovered. Specifically, the first half of Twain's original draft manuscript, which had been thought lost.

The story of this major discovery began with a 62-year-old librarian from Los Angeles. Her aunt, who had lived in upstate New York, recently passed away. Six trunks full of her papers were sent to her niece. When the librarian finally got around to sorting through these papers, she made an incredible find.

Her grandfather, James Gluck, a lawyer and rare book collector, had acted as Twain's literary agent. Twain had sent Gluck the second half of his completed first draft of Huckleberry Finn to sell to the Buffalo and Erie Library in Buffalo, New York. He had once lived in Buffalo.

Twain had lost the first half of his manuscript, which is why Gluck only received the second half. For many years, it was believed that the first half had been lost forever. Then a librarian in Los Angeles sorted through trunks filled with her late aunt's papers.

There, in one of the trunks, she found the lost first half of Twain's original draft of Huckleberry Finn. Stunned, she asked Sotheby's to authenticate the manuscript. They had it shipped by armored car and plane to New York City, and found that it was indeed Mark Twain's lost original first half of Huckleberry Finn.

Since the manuscript contained the author's handwritten corrections and notes, there could be only one explanation for its existence: Twain had found the lost first half of his manuscript and sent it on to James Gluck in Buffalo. By then, he was already working on his second draft and gave no further thought to the original.

Finally put together as a complete whole, the original version of Huckleberry Finn is an amazing discovery. In addition to extended original scenes with more detail, it also included additional scenes that did not appear in the final version of the novel.

One of these additional scenes was a 15-page passage where, on a stormy night, Jim the runaway slave tells Huck Finn stories of his encounters with ghosts and corpses. Deemed too dark and macabre for a novel geared toward children, this scene had to be cut.

After a legal battle between Gluck's heirs, the Buffalo and Erie Library, and the University of Berkeley's Mark Twain Papers Project over the rights to the manuscript, an amicable settlement was reached between the parties.

The Buffalo and Erie Library retained the physical manuscript papers and all three parties would share equally in the royalties when the manuscript was published. Many publishing houses were chomping at the bit for the opportunity to publish it.

In 1995, Random House won the the bidding war for the right to publish the original version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

- Mark Twain

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a segment from the TV series 60 Minutes on a recent censorship controversy surrounding Mark Twain's classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Notes For February 12th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On February 12th, 1938, the famous American writer Judy Blume was born. She was born Judith Sussman in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As a little girl, she recalled, "I spent most of my childhood making up stories inside of my head."

In 1961, she graduated New York University with a Bachelor's degree in education. Two years earlier, she married her first husband, John Blume, with whom she had two sons. They divorced in 1976; though Judy retained John's surname, she described their marriage as "suffocating."

Not long after her divorce in 1976, Blume married physicist Thomas Kitchens. The marriage ended two years later. She described it as "A disaster, a total disaster. After a couple years, I got out. I cried every day. Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong."

It wouldn't be until 1987 that Judy found her soul mate in George Cooper, a law professor turned nonfiction writer, and married him.

Judy Blume had been working as a teacher in 1969 when her first book was published, a funny picture book called The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo. Her children were in preschool at the time.

The following year, Blume established herself as one of the best young adult novelists of her time with two poignant and provocative novels, Iggie's House and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

Iggie's House told the story of Winnie Barringer, a young tomboy who is devastated when her best friend Iggie moves away. The Garbers, an African-American family, move into Iggie's old house and Winnie makes friends with the kids - Glenn, Herbie, and Tina.

Winnie soon learns an unforgettable lesson in the evils of racism when another neighbor, Mrs. Landon, a virulent bigot, determines to drive the Garbers out of the neighborhood. Winnie also observes the effects of Mrs. Landon's racism on her daughter, Clarice.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is a memorable coming of age story centered on 11-year-old Margaret Simon. Margaret is the child of an interfaith marriage - her father is Jewish, her mother Christian.

Margaret's parents have no use for religion, so she wasn't raised in any faith. This irks her because her friends all have a religious affiliation and practice their faiths. Her Jewish grandmother is determined to see her raised as Jewish, which annoys both her parents.

Margaret's mother reveals that she's been estranged from her Christian parents for over a decade because they were fiercely opposed to her marrying a Jewish man. Meanwhile, Margaret strikes up a friendship with Nancy, the girl next door, and meets her friends Gretchen and Janie. They form a club called the Pre-Teen Sensations.

Together, they cope with the onset of puberty, with Margaret experiencing anxiety over getting her period and having to wear a bra. She also has her first real romance with a boy. Then, Margaret's mother makes the mistake of writing to her estranged parents.

Margaret's Christian grandparents pay an unexpected visit, revealing themselves to be virulent anti-Semites and demanding that Margaret be raised a Christian. Margaret's furious Jewish grandmother gets into a fight with them, and Margaret, who can't stand it anymore, explodes at all of them.

She tells them that she wants nothing to do with their god or their religions, and if she ever changes her mind, she'll decide what, if anything, she believes in. Her parents applaud her. The novel ends with Margaret finally getting her period and happy that she's become a woman.

This fantastic and controversial novel is often attacked by conservatives for its sexual frankness and attitude toward religion and always appears on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books.

In 2023, it was adapted as a highly acclaimed feature film co-produced by Judy Blume and with excellent performances by newcomer Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret and Kathy Bates as her Jewish grandmother.

Freckle Juice (1971) is another funny children's picture book about a young boy named Andrew who wants freckles like his friend Nicky has. Sharon, a girl in Andrew's class, sells him a recipe for "Freckle Juice" for fifty cents.

Andrew makes a batch of Freckle Juice - which contains disgusting ingredients - and drinks it, but no freckles appear. He's been swindled. Meanwhile, Nicky, who hates his freckles, buys a recipe from Sharon that's guaranteed to remove them!

Other memorable Judy Blume young adult novels include It's Not the End of the World and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, both published in 1972. In It's Not the End of the World, sixth grader Karen finds her life suddenly turned upside down.

Karen is overjoyed when her teacher turns out to be Mrs. Singer, the very nice teacher she desperately wanted. Unfortunately, Mrs. Singer, who got married over the summer, now acts like a total witch.

Meanwhile, Karen's parents' marriage disintegrates. They fight constantly and seem to really hate each other. When Karen's father announces his plans to file for divorce, her mother is finally happy - until Karen's angry teenage brother Jeff blows up at Mom and runs away from home.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is the first in a series of memorable novels featuring the Hatcher family. Peter Hatcher is a smart yet naive nine-year-old boy in the fourth grade. His 2-year-old little brother Farley, known by his nickname Fudge, is a holy terror.

The irrepressible Fudge wreaks all sorts of havoc around the house and out in public, and always gets away with it - while Peter is expected to be his brother's well behaved keeper. When Fudge gets into trouble, Peter gets the blame. Angry and resentful, he still loves his brother.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing would be followed by Superfudge (1980), Fudge-a-Mania (1990), and Double Fudge (2002). A spinoff of the Fudge series, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, was published in 1972.

This memorable novel featured Peter Hatcher's annoying classmate and sort-of friend Sheila Tubman in her own coming of age story. Though she has an abrasive, self-confident personality, Sheila suffers from several crippling phobias - fears of spiders, dogs, and swimming - which are the source of her secret shame.

When Sheila's family stays at a big house in Tarrytown, New York for the summer, she goes to camp and strikes up a friendship with Merle "Mouse" Ellis, an easygoing, tomboyish girl her age whose genuine courage inspires Sheila to conquer her fears.

In addition to her young adult novels, Judy Blume has also written novels for teenage and adult readers, which remain controversial to this day. Her novels for teenagers, beginning with Deenie (1973), dealt honestly with teen sexuality, including masturbation.

For this reason, disgruntled individuals and conservative groups have often tried to ban Blume's teen novels from high school library shelves. Her first novel geared toward adult readers, Wifey (1978), also drew criticism.

Wifey was set in the time of its publication - the 1970s. The main character, Sandy Pressman, is a bored New Jersey housewife who decides to bring life to her stagnant existence by having a passionate affair with her old high school boyfriend.

This was a time of sexual revolution - when conservative social mores gave way to liberalism and couples began experimenting with swinging and open marriages. Sandy soon discovers evidence that her husband is having an affair of his own...

Blume was sharply criticized for publishing Wifey under her own name instead of using a pseudonym. Even though the book was subtitled "An Adult Novel by Judy Blume," the author's young readers - especially her adolescent readers - took an interest in it.

Depsite the controversy, Wifey and Blume's other adult oriented novels Smart Women (1983) and Summer Sisters (1998) all became critical and commercial successes. To date, her works have won over 90 awards.

Her most recent book, In The Unlikely Event, was published in June of 2015. Set in the early 1950s, it tells the story of Miri Ammerman, a fifteen year old girl struggling to deal with both adolescence and the three plane crashes that take place in her New Jersey hometown within a three month period.

The novel was based on actual events in Judy Blume's life. Three plane crashes took place in her hometown, Elizabeth, New Jersey, from late 1951 through early 1952, claiming a total of 118 lives. Her father, a dentist, was called on to help identify the victims.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."

- Judy Blume

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Judy Blume discussing her most recent novel, In The Unlikely Event, live at the Politics & Prose bookstore and coffeehouse. Enjoy!