This Day In Literary History
On January 10th, 1845, the famous English poet and playwright Robert Browning wrote his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett, a fellow poet who would become his soul mate. Ironically, at the time they first began corresponding, it was unlikely that Elizabeth would become anybody's anything.
As a young girl, Elizabeth Barrett was both intellectually gifted and physically weak. By the age of six, she was reading novels and writing poetry. At fifteen, she was struck with an illness that doctors couldn't diagnose.
Some have speculated that it was a debilitating heart condition that causes pain and weakness, such as angina. All three of her sisters contracted the illness as well, but for them, it didn't last long. They recovered quickly, but Elizabeth did not. She had a severe case.
Whatever the illness was, it and the opiates she took to relieve the pain made Elizabeth pretty much an invalid. She spent most of her time in her room, either in bed or at her desk, writing. She earned a modest income writing poetry, essays, and literary criticism.
She saw few people except for her family, but she had a lot of family to keep her company - three sisters and seven brothers. Despite her illness, Elizabeth Barrett became one of the greatest poets of her generation.
When her classic poetry collection Poems was published in 1844, she became one of the most famous poets in England. Although she saw few visitors, she kept up a huge amount of correspondence.
One of Elizabeth Barrett's greatest admirers was the poet Robert Browning. Not only did he love her poetry, but she was one of the very few literary critics who had given his first poetry collection, Dramatic Lyrics (1842), a good review. A glowing review, in fact.
So, Robert wrote to thank her - and to proclaim his great admiration of her poetry. "The fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought" is how he described her talent. Then he proclaimed his love for her:
I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart... and I love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing - really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning "Would you like to see Miss Barrett?" then he went to announce me... then he returned... you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world's-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be?
Thus, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett began a correspondence that would result in nearly six hundred letters exchanged between them. It would also result in a courtship, and a miraculous improvement in Elizabeth's health.
Though she would not recover completely from her illness, she would regain her strength, leave her invalid's bed, marry, have a child, and live to the age of 55 - far longer than was expected for someone with her condition.
Elizabeth's courtship with Robert Browning had to be carried out in secret, as her father, a domineering tyrant, had forbidden all his eleven children from ever marrying under penalty of disinheritance. Why? The answer lies in the family history.
The wealthy, aristocratic Barrett family came from a long line of plantation owners. Elizabeth Barrett's grandfather, who owned sugar plantations and other businesses in the West Indies, was known for treating his slaves humanely.
He was also known to take slave women as his mistresses. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett, believed that he may have been one of the adopted light skinned babies of his father's slave mistresses.
Politically conservative and a virulent racist, Edward Barrett was greatly shamed by the thought that Negro blood may be running through his and his children's veins. His children were white, but he feared that they might one day produce dark skinned offspring. So he forbade them all from marrying.
Elizabeth Barrett was the polar opposite of her father. A liberal intellectual, she despised slavery, wrote abolitionist poetry, and rejoiced when England outlawed slavery completely in 1833. This resulted in a huge rift between father and daughter.
Elizabeth never gave much thought to her father's decree forbidding marriage because she figured that her illness rendered her too sick too marry. She didn't plan on falling in love with Robert Browning. When they eloped, her father disinherited her and never spoke to her again. Her brothers didn't speak to her for years.
The happy couple settled in Italy, where Elizabeth regained her strength and after several miscarriages, bore their only child, a boy named Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, but known by his nickname, Pen.
Many years later, the Brownings' son published all but one of their letters to each other. The one missing letter was believed to have been burned by Robert Browning at Elizabeth Barrett's insistence because it was so passionate that she feared he might be arrested for sending it through the mail.
Quote Of The Day
"Love is the energy of life."
- Robert Browning
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a reading from the first letter of Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 9th, 1908, the legendary French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, France. Her father was a legal secretary and aspiring actor. Her mother, the daughter of a wealthy banker, raised her children to be devout Catholics like herself.
Simone was devoutly religious as a child, but at the age of fourteen, she lost her faith and would remain an atheist for the rest of her life. An intellectually gifted child, she passed advanced exams in mathematics and philosophy at the age of seventeen.
After studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, she studied for her teacher's exams at the Institut Catholique and Institut Sainte-Marie. She also sat in on courses at the École Normale Supérieure, though she wasn't enrolled there.
At the École Normale Supérieure, Simone struck up friendships with fellow students Paul Nizan and René Maheu, who would become noted writers and philosophers. Another student she met would become her lifelong lover. His name was Jean-Paul Sartre.
Although Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre became lifelong lovers and soul mates who influenced each other as writers and existentialist philosophers, they never married nor lived together as a couple.
Theirs was a very complex relationship. They both had separate lovers. Simone was openly bisexual and often shared her female lovers with Sartre. Her first novel, She Came to Stay (1943), was a fictionalized chronicle of her and Sartre's romantic entanglements with two sisters, one of whom was her student.
Simone's second novel, The Blood of Others (1945) was an existentialist classic set in Nazi-occupied France. As his lover Hélène lies dying, the protagonist Jean Blomart looks back on his own life. Guilty over his comfortable upper middle class upbringing, Blomart breaks ties with his family.
He joins the Communist Party, then leaves it when his friend is killed in a political protest. While he devotes himself to trade union activities, he meets Hélène, but initially rejects her advances.
After she has a reckless affair with another man, gets pregnant, and has an abortion, Blomart tells her that he loves her and proposes marriage. Deep inside, he doubts that he really loves her, but he wants her to be happy.
When France enters World War II, Blomart enlists and becomes a soldier. Against his will, Hélène arranges for him to be posted away from the combat zone. Furious, he breaks up with her. After the defeat of France, the couple is reunited when Hélène joins the French Resistance.
Blomart has become the leader of a Resistance group. Hélène joins the group and is shot during a mission. As he maintains a deathbed vigil, Blomart must come to terms with his guilt, the consequences of his actions, and his feelings for Hélène. He decides to continue with his Resistance work.
In 1944, Simone published her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of existentialist ethics, concepts she would expand on in her second essay, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).
The Ethics of Ambiguity was perhaps the most accessible writing on existentialism during that time, far more accessible than Jean-Paul Sartre's brooding, abstruse classic, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943).
In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, her classic 800-page epic work of feminist philosophy. After debunking the theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, she looks at the misogynistic philosophies of St. Paul, St. Ambrose, and John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople.
The misogyny that forms the foundation of Christianity is in direct contrast to the goddess worship that preceded it. The subordination of women in the name of God is nothing more than a way to maintain patriarchal power for Pope and common man alike.
This need to control women's sexuality to maintain the patriarchy reflects men's deep seated fear of the power of a woman's body - her ability to create life within her, her ability to achieve orgasm without having sexual intercourse with a man, etc.
After centuries of male domination, Woman still yearns for her freedom from reproductive slavery. Abortion, Simone argues, is one means of achieving that freedom. It is not an issue of morality, and making it illegal is an act of "masculine sadism" against women.
The Second Sex became a hugely influential work of feminist philosophy that laid the groundwork for the 1970s women's liberation movement. Simone would join France's women's liberation movement.
In 1971, she signed the Manifest of the 343, a list of famous French women who had abortions though it was illegal at the time. Other signers included actress Catherine Deneuve and actress-director Delphine Seyrig. Three years later, abortion was legalized in France.
After Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980, Simone wrote A Farewell to Sartre (1981), an account of his final years. It was the only major published work of hers that he didn't read prior to publication. She also published a collection of his letters to her.
Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986 at the age of 78.
Quote Of The Day
"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."
- Simone de Beauvoir
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a 1959 interview with Simone de Beauvoir, in French with English subtitles. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 8th, 1824, the legendary English writer Wilkie Collins was born in London, England. He was born William Collins, Jr. His father, William Sr., was a well-known Royal Academician landscape artist.
William, Jr. called himself by his middle name, Wilkie, to honor his godfather, the renowned Scottish painter, David Wilkie. After spending his early childhood in London, at the age of twelve, he went to live with his parents in Italy, an experience he enjoyed greatly.
He returned to London three years later. At the age of seventeen, Collins left school and took a job as an apprentice clerk for a tea merchant firm. He hated it. During the five years he worked for the tea company, he wrote his first novel, Iolani. It would be published posthumously in 1999.
Collins switched gears and entered Lincoln's Inn to study law. In 1847, after his father died, he produced his first published book - Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A.
As he continued his law studies, he considered a career in painting, having exhibited his artwork at Royal Academy's summer exhibition in 1849. However, the following year, his first published novel Antonina was released, thus beginning his career as a writer.
Although it was a work of historical fiction, Antonina introduced Wilkie Collins' distinctive style of "sensation novel," which is what suspense novels and crime thrillers were called at the time.
Antonina is a young woman who finds herself caught up in the struggle between the old pagan and new Christian religions of 5th century Rome, both of which are destructive to the people.
Antonina's father, Numerian, wants to restore Christianity to its founder's ideals. His steward, Ulpius, a pagan, secretly plans to restore Rome's old gods to prominence.
Meanwhile, Numerian's neighbor, the wealthy Vetranio, has become enamored with Antonina. When Numerian catches them in an apparently compromising position, Antonina flees Rome - just before the city is encircled and seized by the Goth army.
In 1851, through a mutual friend, Collins was introduced to the legendary novelist Charles Dickens - an event that would have a huge effect on Collins' life and writings, as the two men became lifelong friends and collaborated on plays and short stories.
Most of Collins's writings would first appear in serialized format in the pages of Dickens' weekly literary magazine, All The Year Round. Collins' younger brother, Charles Allston Collins, would marry Dickens' daughter, Kate.
Throughout his life, Wilkie Collins suffered from rheumatic gout, a form of arthritis. To relieve the pain, he often took laudanum (opium tincture) and got severely addicted to it. He experienced delusions and believed that he had a subjective doppelganger whom he called "Ghost Wilkie."
Opium use and addiction would play a part in his most famous novel, which is considered the first major detective novel in English literature. Published in 1868, it was called The Moonstone.
The Moonstone is a legendary large yellow diamond, acquired by corrupt British soldier Colonel Herncastle through theft and murder. Shunned by his family, Herncastle wills the diamond to his niece, Rachel, as a gift for her 18th birthday.
In addition to its monetary value, the Moonstone has huge religious significance, as it came from the head of a statue of Vishnu in India. The stone's guardians - three Hindu priests - are determined to get it back.
At Rachel's birthday party, she wears the Moonstone to show it to her guests. Later that night, the gem is stolen from her room. Suspicion first falls on Rosanna, a maid and ex-thief.
After Rosanna commits suicide, evidence is found implying that Franklin Blake - whom Rachel had become enamored with - is the real thief. Despite the efforts of brilliant detective Sergeant Cuff, the crime goes unsolved.
Believing that Rachel suspects him of theft, Blake meets with her and she tells him that she saw him steal the gem and has been protecting his reputation. Blake has no memory of stealing the Moonstone. He decides to do some detective work himself.
He discovers that he was secretly drugged with laudanum at the party by Dr. Candy, in retribution for Blake's criticisms of medicine. Then, in a drug-induced trance, Blake took the Moonstone in a subconscious attempt to move it to a safe place.
The stone has disappeared again, turning up later at a London bank, sending Blake on the trail of more skullduggery as he tries to solve the crime. The Moonstone was a huge hit with both Victorian literary critics and readers.
Rightfully considered one of the all-time classics of crime fiction, it was considered shocking at the time of its publication due to its sensationalized depiction of opium addiction.
It was Collins's last great success, coming at the end of his most productive period, where four previous novels, including The Woman In White (1860), No Name (1862), and Armadale (1866) also proved to be bestsellers.
The Black Robe, published in 1881, proved to be Collins's most controversial novel. It told the story of a scheming Catholic priest, Father Bentwell, who plots to swindle nobleman Lewis Romayne out of his estate, Vange Abbey, which once belonged to the Church.
Romayne is racked with guilt after accidentally killing a man - an opponent in a card game who had challenged him to a duel. Romayne goes to London to visit his old friend, Lord Loring. There, he meets Stella Eyrecourt, who falls in love with him.
The Lorings' spiritual adviser is Father Bentwell, a Jesuit priest. When he learns of Romayne's position and situation, he plots to make Romayne convert to Catholicism, then manipulate him into willing his estate to the Church.
To achieve this end, he employs young priest Father Penrose to befriend Romayne and offer him spiritual support. After Romayne marries Stella, Father Bentwell does all he can to undermine the marriage.
Romayne changes his will, leaving his estate to the Church instead of his wife and child. When Romayne learns that he's dying, he finally decides to visit his wife and son. Father Bentwell brings a lawyer to Romayne's deathbed to make sure the Church inherits his estate.
Seeing through the priest's scheme, Romayne proclaims his love for Stella and his son and has the new will destroyed. After he dies, as stipulated in his original will, his wife and son receive his estate.
Although not considered one of Collins' best works, The Black Robe remains a strong and searing indictment of religious hypocrisy and corruption. It was denounced as anti-Catholic when it was first published.
After the publication of The Moonstone in 1868, Collins' laudanum addiction worsened over the years, affecting his health and his writing. The death of his close friend Charles Dickens in 1870 devastated him.
Wilkie Collins died in 1889 at the age of 65. He never married, but he had three children with his girlfriend, Martha Rudd. A prolific writer, he published 30 novels.
He also wrote over 60 short stories, 14 plays, and over 100 pieces of nonfiction, establishing himself as one of the greatest English writers of all time.
Quote Of The Day
"Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?"
- Wilkie Collins
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of Wilkie Collins' classic novel, The Moonstone. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 7th, 1972, the famous American poet John Berryman committed suicide. In 1926, when Berryman was twelve years old, his father, John Allyn Smith, Sr., a banker, committed suicide by shooting himself.
His mother later remarried and he took his stepfather's surname, Berryman. His father's suicide haunted him all his life, affecting his writing and plunging him into a similar battle with depression that he too would lose.
John Berryman's most famous work, a poetry collection called 77 Dream Songs, was published in 1964. The book, which featured a collection of 18-line, three-stanza poems, won him a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
His father's suicide is addressed in several of the poems, mostly indirectly, except for one direct reference where the poet wishes that he could kill his father's corpse. His style was confessional, on the same wavelength as the work of his friend Robert Lowell.
The poems in 77 Dream Songs were idiosyncratic - all free verse with some of them having irregular rhyme schemes. All of them followed the travails of a character named Henry, who is Berryman's alter ego. The author described him this way:
Henry has a hard time. People don't like him, and he doesn't like himself. In fact, he doesn't even know what his name is. His name at one point seems to be Henry House, and at another point it seems to be Henry Pussycat...He [also] has a "friend" who calls him Mr. Bones, and I use friend in quotation marks because this is one of the most hostile friends who ever lived.
In 1968, Berryman published a second, longer volume called His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won him the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize. Both volumes would be combined as one book called The Dream Songs (1969).
He would publish more poetry collections and nonfiction, including a biography of novelist and poet Stephen Crane.
Berryman was a faculty member of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he taught the poetry workshop. His workshop was noted for both its students, which included many soon-to-be-famous poets, and for the intensity of the classes.
One night, during a particularly heated exchange, one of Berryman's students, poet Philip Levine, punched him in the face, breaking his glasses. Ironically, this incident would result in the formation of a lifelong friendship between the two men.
Throughout his life, John Berryman struggled with both alcoholism and severe depression. When his alcoholism began to affect his work, he sought treatment. After spending several months in a rehab facility, he won his battle with alcoholism.
In June of 1971, he returned to teaching, this time at the University of Minnesota. He also began working on a novel. Berryman remained sober for almost a year. Then, frustrated with his work-in-progress, he decided that his novel, which he had titled Recovery, was worthless.
On January 7th, 1972, two days after he started drinking again, John Berryman committed suicide by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. He was 57 years old. Despite his untimely and tragic death, during his life, he proved himself to be one of the most gifted poets of his generation.
Quote Of The Day
“You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.”
- John Berryman
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a rare recording of John Berryman giving a poetry reading at the Guggenheim Museum in 1963. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 3rd, 1892, the legendary English fantasy writer and philologist J.R.R. Tolkein was born. He was born John Ronald Reuel Tolkein in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He would be known as Ronald to his family and friends.
Tolkein's father Arthur was the manager of a British bank in South Africa. When Ronald was three years old, he accompanied his mother, Mabel, and his younger brother, Hilary, on a long visit to England.
His father was supposed to join them, but he died suddenly of rheumatic fever before he could make the trip. Left without an income, his mother moved the family into her parents' home in Birmingham.
They would later move into their own home, supported by relatives. Mabel Tolkein taught her children how to read and write; Ronald could read fluently by the age of four. His mother also taught him Latin and botany.
J.R.R. Tolkein developed an early interest in fantasy literature. Scottish writer Andrew Lang's Fairy Book series was his favorite collection of fairy tale and fantasy stories. It would become a huge influence on his own writing.
When Tolkein was twelve years old, tragedy struck again as his mother died at the age of 34. She had been a diabetic, and in those days, long before the invention of insulin treatment, Type 1 diabetics didn't live long.
A few years before her death, Mabel Tolkein had converted to Catholicism, outraging her devout Baptist family. They broke ties with her and cut off all financial support. In her will, she named her priest, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, as her sons' legal guardian.
In 1908, at the age of sixteen, Tolkein met the woman who would become his true love and wife of over 50 years. Her name was Edith Bratt, and she was three years older. Tolkein's guardian, Father Morgan, was appalled to discover that his ward was in love with a Protestant girl.
Tolkein was ordered not to meet with, speak to, or write to Edith. If he did, Father Morgan would cut off the funding for his college tuition. He had no choice but to follow the order. However, when he turned 21, he wrote Edith a love letter and asked her to marry him. She was already engaged to marry another man.
Edith thought Tolkein had forgotten her, but when they met again face to face, their love was rekindled. Edith returned the other man's engagement ring and agreed to marry Tolkein. Reluctantly, at his insistence, she also agreed to convert to Catholicism.
In October of 1911, Tolkein enrolled at Exeter College, Oxford, with a major in Classics. He would switch his major to English. When World War I broke out in 1914, Tolkein shocked his family by deciding not to enlist for military service until he finished his final year at university.
After graduating in July of 1915, he enlisted. Tolkein trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion in Staffordshire for eleven months. In a letter to his wife Edith, he quipped that "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed."
Nevertheless, he was promoted to Second Lieutenant, transferred to the 11th (Service) Battalion with the British Expeditionary Force, and shipped to France. With her husband away at the front, Edith Tolkein began suffering considerable psychological stress.
So, Ronald devised an ingenious secret code with which he could communicate his movements to her under the nose of the mail censors. Edith would decode the secret messages in his letters, then use the information to track her husband's movements on a map of the Western front.
In October of 1916, Tolkein contracted trench fever, a typhus-like disease carried by the lice that lived in the trenches during the Great War. By the following month, he was back home in England recovering.
Unfit for regular service, when he wasn't in the hospital, (the disease kept recurring) he performed garrison duties. He also worked on an early short story collection, The Book of Lost Tales.
After the war ended and he finally regained his good health, Tolkein took a job as an etymologist for the Oxford English Dictionary. From there, he would become an English professor, teaching first at the University at Leeds, then at Pembroke College, where he would write the novels that made him famous.
Before becoming a famous writer, Tolkein had been a noted academic. He translated classic Old and Middle English works of literature and gave lectures. In 1936, he gave a noted lecture on the classic Old English epic poem Beowulf titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.
His own handwritten translation of Beowulf, which included detailed commentary, clocked in at a whopping 2,000 pages. The manuscript, thought long lost, was discovered in the archives of Britain's famous Bodleian Library in 2003.
One day in the early 1930s, while working as a professor, he engaged in the tedious but necessary task of grading his students' exams, Tolkein found a blank sheet of paper in one student's exam booklet and scribbled a sentence that had just popped into his head: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
From this one sentence came his first classic fantasy novel. Tolkein finished his first draft of The Hobbit in late 1932. He lent the manuscript to friends to get their input. His close friend and fellow writer, C.S. Lewis, loved the book and gave it a rave review.
About four years later, one of Tolkein's students brought the manuscript to the attention of Susan Dagnall, who worked for the publishing house George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. Dagnall showed the manuscript to her boss, co-founder Stanley Unwin, who asked his ten-year-old son Rayner to read it.
The boy loved The Hobbit and gave it a great review. So, on September 21st, 1937, The Hobbit was published in London. The first edition featured numerous illustrations drawn by Tolkein himself. The entire press run of 1,500 copies sold out, thanks to all the glowing reviews that the novel received.
The Hobbit told the story of a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins. According to the author, hobbits were "a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength." Bilbo meets the itinerant wizard Gandalf, who introduces him to a band of dwarfs led by Thorin Oakenshield.
Thorin persuades Bilbo to accompany them all on a perilous journey to the Lonely Mountain, where they plan to recover a vast treasure stolen by the dragon Smaug. The group's trek through the Misty Mountains was inspired by Tolkein's hike through the Swiss Alps while on holiday from secondary school.
Although The Hobbit was originally written as a children's novel, it became a favorite of adult readers and rightfully recognized as a classic work of English literature.
Heavily influenced by Tolkein's lifelong love of mythology and his passion for Old and Middle English literature, it would be the first book of his famous Middle Earth series.
The Hobbit was adapted as a made-for-TV animated musical film in 1977 by legendary animators Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, best known for their classic animated holiday TV specials such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Frosty the Snowman (1969), and Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1970).
The novel would later be adapted as a series of three live-action feature films by director Peter Jackson: An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).
As Tolkein rejoiced in his success with The Hobbit and began working on a sequel, the winds of war brewed again in Europe. Though conservative, Tolkein blasted fascism long before the outbreak of World War II.
Vocally opposed to the Nazi regime, whose racist ideology he considered to be "wholly pernicious and unscientific," he was furious when in 1938, a German publisher preparing to release a German translation of The Hobbit contacted him to verify that he wasn't Jewish.
He opposed all forms of racism, including the apartheid system of South Africa, where he was born. After England declared war on Germany in 1939, Tolkein volunteered for service as a code breaker. He was turned down.
During the war, Tolkein not only denounced the horrors inflicted by the Nazi and Japanese regimes on innocent civilians, he also spoke out against Allied war crimes, including the extermination of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Dresden bombings in Germany.
He also denounced the firebombings of civilians in Kobe and Tokyo, Japan, and when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tolkein blasted the "lunatic physicists" who invented the atomic bomb, calling them "Babel-builders."
Tolkein's magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings, was originally published in three volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring (July 1954), The Two Towers (November 1954), and The Return of the King (October 1955).
The novel finds hobbit Frodo Baggins, armed with a magic ring he inherited from his cousin Bilbo, on a quest that will place him at the center of a cataclysmic struggle between good and evil over the fate of Middle Earth.
Rightfully regarded as one of the great masterpieces of fantasy literature, The Lord of the Rings would be adapted for the radio and the screen, most famously as a series of epic feature films directed by Peter Jackson.
The Lord of the Rings was first adapted as a feature film in 1978 - an animated feature directed by legendary animator Ralph Bakshi, best known for his classic X-rated animated satire Fritz the Cat (1972), based on Robert Crumb's underground comic, and other classic adult-oriented animated films such as Heavy Traffic (1973), Coonskin (1975), and American Pop (1981).
Tolkein retired in 1959, four years after the final volume of The Lord of the Rings was published. While he had hoped to be a successful writer, he never expected that his fantasy novels would make him a world famous literary icon. In England, fan attention was so great that he had to get an unlisted phone number.
In the mid 1960s, Tolkein was surprised to learn that his novels had become hugely popular with the burgeoning British and American countercultures. As a conservative, he opposed the political convictions of his young fans.
Still, he was flattered that they loved his writings, quipping that "even the nose of a very modest idol... cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!"
The legendary English rock band Led Zeppelin based several of their classic songs, including The Battle of Evermore and Misty Mountain Hop, on Tolkein's writings. The legendary Canadian rock band Rush paid tribute to Tolkein with their classic songs Rivendell and The Necromancer.
J.R.R. "Ronald" Tolkein died in November of 1971 at the age of 82.
Quote Of The Day
“All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost."
- J.R.R. Tolkein
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.R.R. Tolkein's classic first fantasy novel, The Hobbit. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On January 2nd, 1949, the famous American playwright Christopher Durang was born in Montclair, New Jersey. His father was an architect, his mother a secretary. He received his primary education in Catholic schools, which would affect him both personally and as a writer.
After earning an English degree at Harvard, Durang earned a Master's degree in play writing at the Yale School of Drama. While studying at Yale, several of his plays were produced there and he worked at the Yale Cabaret.
Durang collaborated on plays with fellow students Albert Innaurato and Wendy Wasserstein. His first professional production, The Idiots Karamazov, was co-written by Innaurato and starred a young drama student named Meryl Streep as the 80-year-old main character.
As a playwright, Durang specialized in comedy - satire, parody, black comedy, and absurdist comedy. He first made his name as a playwright with his comic play A History of the American Film. A few years later, he became a national sensation when his most controversial play opened.
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (1979), a scathing black comedy, was based on the author's experiences as a Catholic school student and his coming to terms with his homosexuality despite the homophobic doctrine of the Church.
Opening in December of 1979, the one-act play's title character, Sister Mary Ignatius, is a Catholic school teacher who is reunited with some of her old students.
Now grown, they perform a mock Christmas pageant for their old teacher and reveal how her insane devotion to Catholic doctrine has scarred them psychologically for life. Unmoved, the nasty nun berates them and condemns them to hell for their sins.
In the play's shocking climax, Sister Mary pulls out a gun and shoots two of her former students dead. One of them, a gay man, refuses to admit that homosexuality is a sin, so Sister Mary kills him to save his soul.
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You earned rave reviews from critics after it opened in 1979. Jack Kroll, drama critic for Newsweek magazine, wrote:
Durang is one of the most ferociously funny young American dramatists, and Sister Mary is his most ferociously funny work. The object of his lacerating laughter is the Roman Catholic Church as educator. The figure of Sister Mary accumulates a terrifying comic power as her moral certainty reaches a climax of insanely logical violence...
The classic treatment of this theme is Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where despite his resisting of Jesuit hellfire pedagogy young Stephen Dedalus is accused by a friend of being “supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.” What gives Durang’s play its ultimate kick is the sense that Sister Mary’s belief is stronger in its visionary mania than the ravaged rationalisms that oppose it.
Conservative Catholics weren't laughing - they blasted the play and its author as anti-Catholic. Performances in Boston and St. Louis were picketed, and other protest rallies were held. After the St. Louis protest, two Missouri state senators tried to pass a law barring theaters there from producing offensive plays.
The legendary TV talk show host Phil Donahue devoted a whole show to the censorship controversy, which helped make the play a box office success. In 2001, the play was adapted as a made-for-cable movie, Sister Mary Explains It All, which starred Diane Keaton as Sister Mary.
Christopher Durang's next play, a farce called Beyond Therapy (1981), found two troubled New Yorkers receiving therapy from psychiatrists. All that Bruce and Prudence want is a happy, stable relationship. Their therapists both suggest that they place a personal ad.
Bruce is an overemotional bisexual prone to crying over the least thing. Prudence is homophobic. Their first date proves to be a disaster, but after their second date, they find that they actually like each other. Bruce's male lover, Bob, is determined to nip this budding romance in the bud and keep Bruce for himself.
Beyond Therapy was adapted as a feature film in 1987 by the legendary director Robert Altman, but Durang hated the movie because Altman practically rewrote his entire play. He called the film project "a very unhappy experience and outcome."
Durang wrote numerous other acclaimed plays including The Marriage of Bette and Boo, The Actor's Nightmare, The Vietnamization of New Jersey, Betty's Summer Vacation, Naomi in the Living Room, and the musical Adrift In Macao.
In 2002, he wrote a play for the Christmas season called Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge. In this hilarious parody of Charles Dickens's classic novella A Christmas Carol, Gladys Cratchit, Bob's wife, is the nasty, abusive, hard drinking, suicidal mother of 21 children.
On another drunken bender, Mrs. Cratchit intrudes on Ebenezer Scrooge's transformation, where an inept Ghost of Christmas Past accidentally takes Scrooge into the lives of Oliver Twist and Leona Helmsley.
The play takes comic jabs at Frank Capra's classic Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life, O. Henry's classic Christmas story The Gift of the Magi, the Enron scandal, and the TV series Touched By an Angel.
Durang's plays won him numerous Obie (off Broadway) Awards. In 2013, he won his first Tony Award for his play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. The darkly funny homage to Chekhov also won him the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play and other awards.
In 2012, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. In addition to his plays, Christopher Durang also wrote for the screen and for television and acted on the stage and in movies. In 2014, he married his husband, John Augustine, with whom he lived for the rest of his life.
Two years later, Durang was diagnosed with logopenic progressive aphasia, a type of dementia thought to be caused by a form of Alzheimer's disease. He gradually withdrew from public life, not announcing his condition publicly until 2022.
He died on April 2nd, 2024, at the age of 75.
Quote Of The Day
"I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I’m going along."
- Christopher Durang
Vanguard Video
Today's video features clips from a live performance of Christopher Durang's classic play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You - starring cult film icon Mink Stole as Sister Mary! Enjoy!
Happy New Year! The Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of its members and blog readers a happy, healthy, prosperous, and productive new year in 2025! This Day In Literary History
On January 1st, 1919, the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger was born. He was born Jerome David Salinger in New York City. His mother Marie was Scotch-Irish, his father Sol was Polish-Jewish and earned his living by selling kosher cheese.
J.D. had an older sister, Doris, who died in 2001. His mother had changed her name to Miriam and passed herself off as Jewish. He would not learn of her true identity until after his bar mitzvah.
J.D. Salinger attended public schools until ninth grade, when he transferred to the private McBurney School. He acted in several school plays and showed a talent for drama, but his father was opposed to him becoming an actor.
Later, he entered the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. There, he was able to get away from his overprotective mother. He had begun writing for the McBurney School newspaper; at the military academy, he wrote stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight."
In 1936, at the age of 17, Salinger entered New York University, where he considered studying special education, but he dropped out the following spring. His father wanted him to learn the meat-importing business.
So, he went to work for a company in Vienna, Austria. He spent only six months in Austria, leaving shortly before the country was annexed by Hitler in the spring of 1938.
After spending a semester at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, Salinger attended a writing class at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine.
Burnett noted that Salinger was an average student at first, but then, about three weeks before the end of the second semester, "he suddenly came to life" and wrote three stories, all of which impressed Burnett. He praised Salinger's talent and accepted one of his stories, The Young Folks, for publication in Story magazine.
In 1941, Salinger met and began dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of legendary playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he found her to be a self-absorbed debutante, he fell in love with her. He called her often and wrote her long letters.
Unfortunately, their relationship ended when Oona began dating film legend Charlie Chaplin, whom she would later marry. That same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker magazine, which rejected seven of them.
However, in December of 1941, the magazine accepted Slight Rebellion Off Madison, a short story that introduced Salinger's most popular character - a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield, who had "pre-war jitters."
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the story was deemed unpublishable. It would not appear in The New Yorker until 1946. Several months after the Pearl Harbor attack, in the spring of 1942, J.D. Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army.
He saw action with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge. During the Normandy campaign, he arranged to meet a fellow writer named Ernest Hemingway, who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris.
Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, despite his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed with Salinger's writing, saying of the author, "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two men began corresponding; Salinger would later say that his talks with Hemingway were among his few positive memories of the war.
As the war continued, Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his fluency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He would become one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp.
He later told his daughter, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." The war would leave lifelong psychological scars on Salinger; he had to be hospitalized for combat stress, aka PTSD, for a few weeks after V.E. Day.
After he recovered, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "denazification" duty in Germany. During this time, he fell in love with and married a German girl named Sylvia Welter. He brought her back with him to the U.S., but the marriage only lasted eight months, and Sylvia returned to Germany.
In the late 1940s, Salinger became a follower of Zen Buddhism, the first of many spiritual pursuits. He resumed his writing career, and in 1948, submitted a new story to The New Yorker titled A Perfect Day For Bananafish. The editors were so impressed with the story that they accepted it right away and signed the author to a contract.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish was the first story that introduced Salinger's recurring characters, the troubled Glass family, consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious kids, Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Walker, Zooey, and Franny.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish featured Seymour Glass. On a second honeymoon with his wife Muriel, Seymour spends a day at the beach while Muriel remains in their hotel room, talking to her mother on the phone.
At the beach, Seymour meets and befriends Sybil Carpenter, a cute and inquisitive six-year-old girl. He enjoys her company and tells her a story about bananafish. Later, Seymour returns to his hotel room and finds his wife asleep. Removing a gun from his luggage, he sits next to Muriel on the bed and blows his brains out.
Not long after the success of Bananafish, Salinger was approached by film producer Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted to buy the rights to his earlier short story, Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut. Salinger immediately agreed, as Hollywood had shown interest in another of his stories, The Varoni Brothers, but nothing ever came of it.
Salinger hoped that Uncle Wiggily "would make a good movie," but when it was released as My Foolish Heart in 1949, the film was a critical and commercial failure and had little to do with the story on which it was based.
A furious Salinger vowed that no more film adaptations of his work would be made - a vow he kept for the rest of his life, despite Hollywood's persistent interest in adapting his celebrated first novel, which was published in 1951, just a couple of years after the Uncle Wiggily film fiasco.
The Catcher In The Rye, Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story, opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Holden is an angry, alienated young man who may be losing his mind. He believes that his teachers and fellow students are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and gets assaulted by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy - a misinterpretation of Robert Burns's song Comin' Through The Rye - where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must make sure that they don't wander too close to the edge; he must become a "catcher in the rye."
After leaving the apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs.
Later that night, Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini patting his head in a "flitty" way. Whether or not this is a sexual advance is up for speculation and ultimately left to the reader to decide.
When Holden tells his little sister that he plans to move out West, Phoebe wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
He watches with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel. He alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September.
That's just a bare outline of The Catcher In The Rye. You must read it for yourself. It's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial.
The American Library Association (ALA) has listed it as the 13th most challenged book from 1990-2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005. The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy.
When high school English teachers assign the book to their classes, they are often met with protests from disgruntled parents and conservative activist groups who demand that the book be removed from both the teachers' assigned reading lists and the school libraries' shelves.
J.D. Salinger followed his famous novel with a short story collection, Nine Stories, (1953) which would include both A Perfect Day For Bananafish and another celebrated tale, For Esme - With Love And Squalor. The haunting, poingant story is narrated by an American Army officer known only as Staff Sergeant X.
While waiting to be sent into combat, Staff Sergeant X goes to an English tearoom, where a young teenage British girl named Esme approaches him and offers to write to him. He immediately agrees.
Thirty minutes later, Esme leaves, telling X "I hope you return with all your faculties intact." It's because of Esme's letter, which he receives on V.E. Day, that X, confined to a mental hospital for combat stress, is able to regain his faculties.
In 1955, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student with whom he would have two children, Margaret and Matthew. He continued to write and publish short stories. In 1961, he published a short novel, Franny And Zooey, which originally appeared as two separate short stories in The New Yorker.
The book tells another story of the Glass family, narrated by Buddy Glass, who tells of how his sister Franny, a college student, has a Holden Caulfield-esque nervous breakdown while having lunch with her boyfriend Lane, troubled by the phoniness of her classmates and the egotism of the faculty.
At the request of their mother, Franny's brother Zooey helps her recover from her nervous breakdown through a long and intimate talk wherein he helps her sort out her personal and spiritual beliefs.
J.D. Salinger would continue to publish sporadically. In June of 1965, his last published work, a novella titled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in the New Yorker. Afterward, at the age of 47, Salinger retired from writing, tired of all the media attention his novel The Catcher In The Rye continued to bring him.
He began to withdraw from public life. His last interview was given in 1980. Then he became a recluse, appearing only to defend his privacy and his works in court. In 1986, British biographer Ian Hamilton planned to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger - A Writing Life (1935-65).
Salinger learned that the book contained a collection of letters that he'd written to friends and fellow authors, so he sued to halt its publication. After two years of legal wrangling, the biography was published in a revised version, with the letters' contents paraphrased.
In 1995, Salinger had his lawyers block the American premiere of Pari, an unauthorized adaptation of Franny And Zooey by Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui. And in June of 2009, Salinger obtained an injunction to block the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye.
The novel was an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher In The Rye, written by Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym J.D. California. Colting filed an appeal, which resulted in a settlement in 2011.
As part of the settlement, Colting agreed not to publish his book in the U.S. and Canada until The Catcher In The Rye enters the public domain in those countries. He also agreed not to use the title Coming Through The Rye.
In 1999, Salinger's daughter Margaret published a memoir, Dream Catcher, where she depicted her father as a control freak who exerted harrowing control over her mother and suffered from severe post traumatic stress disorder all his life.
Margaret claimed that Salinger maintained his service haircut, wore his Army jacket, and drove around his estate (and town) in an old Jeep. She dispelled the Salinger myths established by Ian Hamilton in his book.
She also discussed her father's passion for films; despite his negative experiences with Hollywood studios, Salinger was a huge film buff and owned a large collection of 16mm film prints.
A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret Salinger's brother Matthew wrote a letter to the New York Observer denouncing his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and discrediting her memoir.
J.D. Salinger died in 2010 at the age of 91. His classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye, may finally be adapted as a feature film; in a letter written in 1957, Salinger stated that he would be open to an adaptation after his death as a means of providing for his widow and children.
Four years after Salinger's death, a collection of three of his early stories was published. It was followed in 2018 by a Centennial Edition boxed set comprised of four deluxe hardcover editions containing all the writings Salinger published during his lifetime.
A collection of his unpublished works is expected to be released as well.
Quote Of The Day "When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion."
- J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic short story, A Perfect Day For Bananafish. Enjoy!
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